Machine learning approach for detecting and combating bring your own device (BYOD) security threats and attacks: a systematic mapping review

Bring your own device (BYOD) paradigm that permits employees to come with their own mobile devices to join the organizational network is rapidly changing the organizational operation method by enhancing flexibility, productivity, and efficiency. Despite these benefits, security issues remain a concern in organizational settings. A considerable number of studies have been conducted and published in this domain without a detailed review of the security solution mechanisms. Moreover, some reviews conducted focused more on conventional approaches such as mobile content management, and application content management. Hence, the implementation of security in BYOD using the conventional method is ineffective. Thus, machine learning approaches seem to be the promising approach, which provides a solution to the security problem in the BYOD environment. This study presents a comprehensive systematic mapping review that focused on the application of the machine learning approach for the mitigation of security threats and attacks in the BYOD environment by highlighting the current trends in the existing studies. Five academic databases were searched and a total of 753 of the primary studies published between 2012 and 2021 were initially retrieved. These studies were screened based on their title, abstract and full text to check their eligibility and relevance for the study. However, forty primary studies were included and analyzed in the systematic mapping review (SMR). Based on the analysis and bubble plot mapping, significant research trends were identified on security threats and attacks, machine learning approaches, datasets usage, and evaluation metrics. The SMR result demonstrates the rise in the number of investigations regarding malware and unauthorized access to existing security threats and attacks. The SMR study indicates that supervised learning approaches such as SVM, DT, and RF are the most employed learning model by the previous research. Thus, there is an open research issue in the application of unsupervised learning approaches such as clustering and deep learning approaches. Therefore, the SMR has set the pace for creating new ground research in the machine learning implementation in the BYOD environment, which will offer invaluable insight into the study field, and researchers can employ it to find a research gap in the research domain.