XRecon: An Explainbale IoT Reconnaissance Attack Detection System Based on Ensemble Learning
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IoT devices have grown in popularity in recent years. Statistics show that the number of online IoT devices exceeded 35 billion in 2022. This rapid growth in adoption made these devices an obvious target for malicious actors. Attacks such as botnets and malware injection usually start with a phase of reconnaissance to gather information about the target IoT device before exploitation. In this paper, we introduce a machine-learning-based detection system for reconnaissance attacks based on an explainable ensemble model. Our proposed system aims to detect scanning and reconnaissance activity of IoT devices and counter these attacks at an early stage of the attack campaign. The proposed system is designed to be efficient and lightweight to operate in severely resource-constrained environments. When tested, the implementation of the proposed system delivered an accuracy of 99%. Furthermore, the proposed system showed low false positive and false negative rates at 0.6% and 0.05%, respectively, while maintaining high efficiency and low resource consumption.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".