*Article* **IoT Botnet Detection Using Salp Swarm and Ant Lion Hybrid Optimization Model**

**Ruba Abu Khurma 1, Iman Almomani 1,2 and Ibrahim Aljarah 1,\***


**Abstract:** In the last decade, the devices and appliances utilizing the Internet of Things (IoT) have expanded tremendously, which has led to revolutionary developments in the network industry. Smart homes and cities, wearable devices, traffic monitoring, health systems, and energy savings are typical IoT applications. The diversity in IoT standards, protocols, and computational resources makes them vulnerable to security attackers. Botnets are challenging security threats in IoT devices that cause severe Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Intrusion detection systems (IDS) are necessary for safeguarding Internet-connected frameworks and enhancing insufficient traditional security countermeasures, including authentication and encryption techniques. This paper proposes a wrapper feature selection model (SSA–ALO) by hybridizing the salp swarm algorithm (SSA) and ant lion optimization (ALO). The new model can be integrated with IDS components to handle the high-dimensional space problem and detect IoT attacks with superior efficiency. The experiments were performed using the N-BaIoT benchmark dataset, which was downloaded from the UCI repository. This dataset consists of nine datasets that represent real IoT traffic. The experimental results reveal the outperformance of SSA–ALO compared to existing related approaches using the following evaluation measures: TPR (true positive rate), FPR (false positive rate), G-mean, processing time, and convergence curves. Therefore, the proposed SSA–ALO model can serve IoT applications by detecting intrusions with high true positive rates that reach 99.9% and with a minimal delay even in imbalanced intrusion families.

**Keywords:** Internet of Things; IoT; botnets; attack detection; feature selection; ant lion optimization; security; DoS; malware; salp swarm optimization
