IoT devices are increasingly deployed in daily life. Many of these devices are, however, vulnerable due to insecure design, implementation, and configuration. As a result, many networks already have vulnerable IoT devices that are easy to compromise. This has led to a new category of malware specifically targeting IoT devices. However, existing intrusion detection techniques are not effective in detecting compromised IoT devices given the massive scale of the problem in terms of the number of different types of devices and manufacturers involved. In this paper, we present DIoT, an autonomous self-learning distributed system for detecting compromised IoT devices effectively. In contrast to prior work, DIoT uses a novel self-learning approach to classify devices into device types and build normal communication profiles for each of these that can subsequently be used to detect anomalous deviations in communication patterns. DIoT utilizes a federated learning approach for aggregating behavior profiles efficiently. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first system to employ a federated learning approach to anomaly-detection-based intrusion detection. Consequently, DIoT can cope with emerging new and unknown attacks. We systematically and extensively evaluated more than 30 off-the-shelf IoT devices over a long term and show that DIoT is highly effective (95.6% detection rate) and fast (~257 ms) at detecting devices compromised by, for instance, the infamous Mirai malware. DIoT reported no false alarms when evaluated in a real-world smart home deployment setting.
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