Using manufacturer usage descriptions for IoT network security: An experimental investigation of smart home network devices

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has shown significant growth in the past decades. Recently, IoT networks have been subject to cybersecurity threats on multiple fronts. A lack of improvement in IoT infrastructures' cybersecurity may result in challenges with a broad impact, such as DDoS attacks that target global DNS services. This paper reviews existing solutions to mitigate attacks on and from IoT networks. As a specific mitigation approach, we propose the use of a standardized whitelisting method, namely Manufacturer Usage Description (MUD), which provides enhanced explainability over machine learning-based approaches and is complementary to them. For evaluating the use of MUD in IoT networks, we report a case study, which we conducted through traffic analysis of two IoT devices by detecting recognizable and distinctive traffic patterns, which demonstrate the feasibility of MUD-based intrusion prevention.