Towards a Hybrid Machine Learning Model for Intelligent Cyber Threat Identification in Smart City Environments

The concept of a smart city requires the integration of information and communication technologies and devices over a network for the better provision of services to citizens. As a result, the quality of living is improved by continuous analyses of data to improve service delivery by governments and other organizations. Due to the presence of extensive devices and data flow over networks, the probability of cyber attacks and intrusion detection has increased. The monitoring of this huge amount of data traffic is very difficult, though machine learning algorithms have huge potential to support this task. In this study, we compared different machine learning models used for cyber threat classification. Our comparison was focused on the analyzed cyber threats, algorithms, and performance of these models. We have identified that real-time classification, accuracy, and false-positive rates are still the major issues in the performance of existing models. Accordingly, we have proposed a hybrid deep learning (DL) model for cyber threat intelligence (CTI) to improve threat classification performance. Our model was based on a convolutional neural network (CNN) and quasi-recurrent neural network (QRNN). The use of QRNN not only resulted in improved accuracy but also enabled real-time classification. The model was tested on BoT-IoT and TON_IoT datasets, and the results showed that the proposed model outperformed the other models. Due to this improved performance, we emphasize that the application of this model in the real-time environment of a smart system network will help in reducing threats in a reasonable time.