Critical Analysis of DDoS—An Emerging Security Threat over IoT Networks

Ubiquitous computing facilitated by Internet of things (IoT) devices has made modern day life easier across many areas. It offers capabilities to measure parameters associated with the devices, to infer from their results, and to understand and control millions of such devices in various application domains. The enormous potential of IoT systems enables each and every device to communicate with each other, thereby providing more productivity. In this scenario, heterogeneity of technologies in use is expected to intensify the security threats. Policy enforcement for the assurance of privacy and security plays a key role in these systems. Fulfillment of privacy and security related requirements include confidentiality of data, user and device authentication, access control, and trust assurance among the things. However, recent reported events related to security attacks show colossal vulnerabilities among IoT devices capable of bringing security risks to the whole environment. One of the common uses of these devices by the attackers is to generate powerful distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. It is one of the most prominent attacking behaviors over a network by a group of geographically distributed zombie computers that interrupt and block legitimate users to use the network resources and hence, requires great attention. In this regard, the current work being novel in the field puts concentration on variants of DDoS attacks and their impact on IoT networks along with some of the existing countermeasures to defend against these attacks. The paper also discusses the detailed working mechanism of these attacks and highlights some of the commonly used tools that are deployed in such attack scenarios.