A Transformer-Based Approach for DDoS Attack Detection in IoT Networks

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Dey, Sandipan, Kate, Payal Santosh, Upadhyay, Vatsala, Vaish, Abhishek
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Dey, Sandipan
Kate, Payal Santosh
Upadhyay, Vatsala
Vaish, Abhishek
author_facet Dey, Sandipan
Kate, Payal Santosh
Upadhyay, Vatsala
Vaish, Abhishek
contents DDoS attacks have become a major threat to the security of IoT devices and can cause severe damage to the network infrastructure. IoT devices suffer from the inherent problem of resource constraints and are therefore susceptible to such resource-exhausting attacks. Traditional methods for detecting DDoS attacks are not efficient enough to cope with the dynamic nature of IoT networks, as well as the scalability of the attacks, diversity of protocols, high volume of traffic, and variability in device behavior, and variability of protocols like MQTT, CoAP, making it hard to implement security across all the protocols. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, i.e., the use of Transformer models, which have shown remarkable performance in natural language processing tasks, for detecting DDoS attacks on IoT devices. The proposed model extracts features from network traffic data and processes them using a self-attention mechanism. Experiments conducted on a real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms traditional machine learning techniques, which can be validated by comparing both approaches' accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The results of this study show that the Transformer models can be an effective solution for detecting DDoS attacks on IoT devices and have the potential to be deployed in real-world IoT environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10636
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Transformer-Based Approach for DDoS Attack Detection in IoT Networks
Dey, Sandipan
Kate, Payal Santosh
Upadhyay, Vatsala
Vaish, Abhishek
Cryptography and Security
Information Theory
DDoS attacks have become a major threat to the security of IoT devices and can cause severe damage to the network infrastructure. IoT devices suffer from the inherent problem of resource constraints and are therefore susceptible to such resource-exhausting attacks. Traditional methods for detecting DDoS attacks are not efficient enough to cope with the dynamic nature of IoT networks, as well as the scalability of the attacks, diversity of protocols, high volume of traffic, and variability in device behavior, and variability of protocols like MQTT, CoAP, making it hard to implement security across all the protocols. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, i.e., the use of Transformer models, which have shown remarkable performance in natural language processing tasks, for detecting DDoS attacks on IoT devices. The proposed model extracts features from network traffic data and processes them using a self-attention mechanism. Experiments conducted on a real-world dataset demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms traditional machine learning techniques, which can be validated by comparing both approaches' accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-score. The results of this study show that the Transformer models can be an effective solution for detecting DDoS attacks on IoT devices and have the potential to be deployed in real-world IoT environments.
title A Transformer-Based Approach for DDoS Attack Detection in IoT Networks
topic Cryptography and Security
Information Theory
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10636