Detection and Mitigation of DoS and DDoS Attacks in IoT-Based Stateful SDN : An Experimental Approach

Sensors (Basel). 2020 Feb 3;20(3):816. doi: 10.3390/s20030816.

Abstract

The expected advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) has triggered a large demand of embedded devices, which envisions the autonomous interaction of sensors and actuators while offering all sort of smart services. However, these IoT devices are limited in computation, storage, and network capacity, which makes them easy to hack and compromise. To achieve secure development of IoT, it is necessary to engineer scalable security solutions optimized for the IoT ecosystem. To this end, Software Defined Networking (SDN) is a promising paradigm that serves as a pillar in the fifth generation of mobile systems (5G) that could help to detect and mitigate Denial of Service (DoS) and Distributed DoS (DDoS) threats. In this work, we propose to experimentally evaluate an entropy-based solution to detect and mitigate DoS and DDoS attacks in IoT scenarios using a stateful SDN data plane. The obtained results demonstrate for the first time the effectiveness of this technique targeting real IoT data traffic.

Keywords: DDoS; DoS; Internet of Things; entropy; experimental evaluation; stateful SDN.