Reinforcement Learning for IoT Security: A Comprehensive Survey

The number of connected smart devices has been increasing exponentially for different Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. Security has been a long run challenge in the IoT systems which has many attack vectors, security flaws and vulnerabilities. Securing billions of connected devices in IoT is a must task to realize the full potential of IoT applications. Recently, researchers have proposed many security solutions for IoT. Machine learning has been proposed as one of the emerging solutions for IoT security and reinforcement learning (RL) is gaining more popularity for securing IoT systems. RL, unlike other machine learning techniques, can learn the environment by having minimum information about the parameters to be learned. It solves the optimization problem by interacting with the environment adapting the parameters on the fly. In this article, we present an comprehensive survey of different types of cyberattacks against different IoT systems and then we present RL and deep RL-based security solutions to combat those different types of attacks in different IoT systems. Furthermore, we present the RL for securing CPS systems (i.e., IoT with feedback and control), such as smart grid and smart transportation system. The recent important attacks and countermeasures using RL in IoT are also summarized in the form of tables. With this article, readers can have a more thorough understanding of IoT security attacks and countermeasures using RL, as well as research trends in this area.