A Performance Assessment of Network Address Shuffling in IoT Systems

While the large scale distribution and unprecedented connectivity of embedded systems in the Internet of Things (IoT) has enabled various useful application scenarios, it also poses a risk to users and infrastructure alike. Recent incidents, like the Mirai botnet, have shown that these devices are often not sufficiently protected against attacks and can therefore be abused for malicious purposes, like distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. While it may be an impossible task to completely secure all systems against attacks, moving target defense (MTD) has been proposed as an alternative to prevent attackers from finding devices and endpoints and eventually launching their attacks against them. One of these approaches is network-based moving target defense which relies on the obfuscation and change of network level information, like IP addresses and ports. Since most of these approaches have been developed with desktop applications in mind, their usefulness in IoT applications has not been investigated.