Cyber Attacks Evaluation Targeting Internet Facing IoT: An Experimental Evaluation

The rapid growth of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) in the 21st century has resulted in the emergence of a novel technological paradigm; known as the Internet of Things, or IoT. The IoT, which is at the heart of today's smart infrastructure, aids in the creation of a ubiquitous network of things by simplifying interconnection between smart digital devices and enabling Machine to Machine (M2M) communication. As of now, there are numerous examples of IoT use cases available, assisting every person in this world towards making their lives easier and more convenient. The latest advancement of IoT in a variety of domains such as healthcare, smart city, smart agriculture has led to an exponential growth of cyber-attacks that targets these pervasive IoT environments, which can even lead to jeopardizing the lives of people; that is involved with it. In general, this IoT can be considered as every digital object that is connected to the Internet for intercommunication. Hence in this regard to analyze cyber threats that come through the Internet, here we are doing an experimental evaluation to analyze the requests, received to exploit the opened Secure Shell (SSH) connection service of an IoT device, which in our case a Raspberry Pi devices, which connected to the Internet for more than six consecutive days. By opening the SSH service on Raspberry Pi, it acts as a Honeypot device where we can log and retrieve all login attempt requests received to the SSH service opened. Inspired by evaluating the IoT security attacks that target objects in the pervasive IoT environment, after retrieving all the login requests made through the open SSH connection we then provide a comprehensive analysis along with our observations about the origin of the requests and the focus areas of intruders; in this study.