Software-Defined Edge Defense Against IoT-Based DDoS

Abstract

Industries, people's activities and urban infrastructure rely more and more on "Internet of Things" (IoT) devices for all kinds of activities and operations. Although securing a computer network has always been a difficult task, it transmutes into a massive challenge with the exponentially-growing network size and heterogenity in these systems. A recent example in that vein is a major security violation in the form of DDoS attacks which were performed by a huge number of IoT devices infected with a botnet called "Mirai". Moreover, the role of these devices as control, sensing and communication substrate in critical infrastructures aggravate such problems. Nevertheless, there are some new networking concepts and technologies which promise to offer remedies for the aforementioned challenges; one is software-defined networking (SDN) and another one is fog computing, which primarily provide global network control and local services, respectively. In this paper, we introduce a edge-oriented detection/mitigation scheme against DDoS in IoT using SDN and Fog approaches while utilizing Mirai as the case study.