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.
Keywords: IoT; XAI; attack; detection; machine learning; reconnaissance.