MPD: Moving Target Defense through Communication Protocol Dialects
Yongsheng Mei, Kailash Gogineni, Tian Lan, Guru Venkataramani

TL;DR
This paper introduces MPD, a novel moving target defense method that dynamically customizes communication protocol dialects to enhance IoT security against attacks like DoS and packet modifications, with minimal performance impact.
Contribution
It proposes a new MTD approach using protocol dialects, including a dialect generation and synchronization mechanism, and demonstrates its effectiveness on standard and IoT protocols.
Findings
Effective against DoS and malicious packet attacks
Negligible overhead in protocol communication
Feasible implementation on standard and IoT protocols
Abstract
Communication protocol security is among the most significant challenges of the Internet of Things (IoT) due to the wide variety of hardware and software technologies involved. Moving target defense (MTD) has been adopted as an innovative strategy to solve this problem by dynamically changing target system properties and configurations to obfuscate the attack surface. Nevertheless, the existing work of MTD primarily focuses on lower-level properties (e.g., IP addresses or port numbers), and only a limited number of variations can be generated based on these properties. In this paper, we propose a new approach of MTD through communication protocol dialects (MPD) - which dynamically customizes a communication protocol into various protocol dialects and leverages them to create a moving target defense. Specifically, MPD harnesses a dialect generating function to create protocol dialects…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Code & Models
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsCryptographic Implementations and Security · Chaos-based Image/Signal Encryption · Advanced Malware Detection Techniques
