An efficient intrusion detection system for MQTT-IoT using enhanced chaotic salp swarm algorithm and LightGBM

Internet of Things (IoT) networks are becoming increasingly popular for monitoring critical environments of various types. For the communication of IoT devices, several lightweight protocols have been developed. MQTT (message queuing telemetry transport) is a widely used messaging protocol in IoT using the publish-subscribe technique. The openness of publish-subscribe model and the limited built-in authentication capabilities makes it vulnerable to intruders. Hence, an intrusion detection system (IDS) has a vital role in MQTT-IoT security. This paper proposes an efficient intrusion detection mechanism for the MQTT-IoT networks using an enhanced chaotic salp swarm optimization algorithm (ECSSA) and LightGBM classifier. Traditional IDS uses a lot of irrelevant data and undesirable attributes, resulting in long detection times and low performance. To overcome the limitations, the proposed IDS uses ECSSA for feature selection and LightGBM classifier for better detection accuracy. The experimental verification on MC-IoT, MQTT-IoT-IDS2020, and MQTTset datasets demonstrates that ECSSA and LightGBM improve the overall accuracy rate. The proposed technique outperforms the existing approaches with an accuracy of 99.38%, 98.91%, and 98.35% in the three test sets, MC-IoT, MQTT-IoT-IDS2020, and MQTTset, respectively.