A Blockchain-Enabled Security Framework for Threat Detection in IoT Environments Using a Gated Recurrent Unit Deep Learning Model

Abstract

The rising use of the Internet of Things (IoT) has changed the communication and automation landscape in various industries. However, the growing number of interconnected and vulnerable IoT devices has created several cybersecurity challenges, and the conventional intrusion detection system is not designed to handle the dynamicity of sophisticated cyber-attacks and secure information management. This study presents a blockchain-based security framework for intrusion detection in an IoT environment that uses a Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) to achieve high-level detection accuracy and blockchain technology to guarantee information security. Edge-IIoTset benchmark data containing about 2.2 million traffic instances and 61 traffic features were collected, preprocessed, and split into training, validation, and testing datasets at a ratio of 70:15:15 for model development and evaluation. The GRU network was trained to capture sequential patterns in network traffic with high accuracy, while the blockchain layer was leveraged to ensure secure detection record storage and information sharing. The model attained 99.12% accuracy, 99.08% precision, 98.97% recall, 99.02% F1-score, and 0.9987 ROC-AUC. Additionally, the blockchain layer achieved an average of 850 transactions per second with a 2.3-second block confirmation time, while the framework recorded an average of 3.2 millisecond traffic detection time. Thus, the proposed framework was efficient and effective in detecting and responding to cyber-attacks in an IoT network.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21726292