Security Analysis of IoT Traffic Classification Systems Under Adversarial Machine Learning Attacks

Abstract

A constraint-aware adversarially robust Internet of Things (IoT) traffic classification system with protocol validity, device behavior consistency, and manifold-aware training and evaluation is presented in this study. In realistic IoT communication semantics, resilience as a constrained min–max optimization problem allows adversarial perturbations. Comprehensive testing on sample IoT traffic datasets shows that baseline models achieve 95.1% accuracy under benign conditions but plummet following hostile attacks. The proposed defense reduces untargeted attack success rates to <18% while achieving 81.3% accuracy at ε=0.05 and 70.6% at ε=0.10. The proposed constraint-aware adversarial framework significantly enhances IoT traffic classification by achieving 97.4% accuracy and maintaining 90.6% robustness at ε=0.10, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. It reduces attack success rates to 11.2% (untargeted) and 7.9% (targeted) through protocol-compliant perturbations and manifold-aware learning. Additionally, the model achieves an efficient trade-off with 21.4 ms latency and 650 flows/sec throughput, making it suitable for real-time edge deployment. These results demonstrate improved robustness, realism, and deployability compared to existing approaches.