A Comprehensive Study on Distributed Denial of Service Attacks in Internet of Things Based Smart Grid

Internet of Things is one of the emerging fields and it is expected that more than 50 million devices are connected through internet by 2020. In addition, extending internet connectivity into various applications will add comfort to our day to-day life. One such application is smart grid which necessitates advanced metering infrastructure for monitoring and control operation. However, Internet of Things poses a serious threat since the data generated from these devices grow longer thereby resulting in big data which is to be stored in database and further analyzed for control. If any malicious activity occurs in either database or during communication, then it would result in major disaster. Therefore, mechanisms for secure data communication are mandate. Furthermore, security mechanism should be cognitive as Internet of Things involves diverse devices. Based on the literature, it is revealed that Distributed Denial of Service is one of the most prevalent attacks in Internet of Things applications leading to unavailability of service to legitimate users. Hence, the key objective of the paper is to explore the distributed denial of service attack, its types and various mitigation methods. Furthermore, the countermeasures to prevent these types of attacks are addressed.