Enabling Cooperative IoT Security via Software Defined Networks (SDN)

TL;DR

This paper proposes an SDN-based architecture to enhance IoT security through cooperative attack detection and response, improving scalability and efficiency in defending against collusive cyberattacks on IoT devices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel SDN-enabled cooperative security platform for IoT, facilitating quick sharing of attack information among controllers and effective attack mitigation.

Findings

Hardware SDN implementation outperforms virtual environments in efficiency.

The proposed architecture scales well in both virtual and physical SDN environments.

Cooperative security via SDN improves IoT attack response effectiveness.

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming an increasingly attractive target for cybercriminals. We observe that many attacks to IoTs are launched in a collusive way, such as brute-force hacking usernames and passwords, to target at a particular victim. However, most of the time our defending mechanisms to such kind of attacks are carried out individually and independently, which leads to ineffective and weak defense. To this end, we propose to leverage Software Defined Networks (SDN) to enable cooperative security for legacy IP-based IoT devices. SDN decouples control plane and data plane, and can help bridge the knowledge divided between the application and network layers. In this paper, we discuss the IoT security problems and challenges, and present an SDN-based architecture to enable IoT security in a cooperative manner. Furthermore, we implemented a platform that can quickly share the attacking information with peer controllers and block the attacks. We carried out our experiments in both virtual and physical SDN environments with OpenFlow switches. Our evaluation results show that both environments can scale well to handle attacks, but hardware implementation is much more efficient than a virtual one.