Generative Adversarial and Transformer Network Synergy for Robust Intrusion Detection in IoT Environments

Intrusion detection in the Internet of Things (IoT) environments is increasingly critical due to the rapid proliferation of connected devices and the growing sophistication of cyber threats. Traditional detection methods often fall short in identifying multi-class attacks, particularly in the presence of high-dimensional and imbalanced IoT traffic. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel hybrid intrusion detection framework that integrates transformer networks with generative adversarial networks (GANs), aiming to enhance both detection accuracy and robustness. In the proposed architecture, the transformer component effectively models temporal and contextual dependencies within traffic sequences, while the GAN component generates synthetic data to improve feature diversity and mitigate class imbalance. Additionally, an improved non-dominated sorting biogeography-based optimization (INSBBO) algorithm is employed to fine-tune the hyper-parameters of the hybrid model, further enhancing learning stability and detection performance. The model is trained and evaluated on the CIC-IoT-2023 and TON_IoT dataset, which contains a diverse range of real-world IoT traffic and attack scenarios. Experimental results show that our hybrid framework consistently outperforms baseline methods, in both binary and multi-class intrusion detection tasks. The transformer-GAN achieves a multi-class classification accuracy of 99.67%, with an F1-score of 99.61%, and an area under the curve (AUC) of 99.80% in the CIC-IoT-2023 dataset, and achieves 98.84% accuracy, 98.79% F1-score, and 99.12% AUC on the TON_IoT dataset. The superiority of the proposed model was further validated through statistically significant t -test results, lower execution time compared to baselines, and minimal standard deviation across runs, indicating both efficiency and stability. The proposed framework offers a promising approach for enhancing the security and resilience of next-generation IoT systems.