Spill the Beans: Extrospection of Internet of Things by Exploiting Denial of Service

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) exposes various vulnerabilities at different levels. One such exploitable vulnerability is Denial of Service (DoS). In this work, we focus on a large-scale extensive study of various forms of DoS and how it can be exploited in different protocols of IoT. We propose an attack and defense framework called OWL which is tailored for IoT and that can perform various forms of DoS on IP, Bluetooth, and Zigbee devices. We consider various DoS vulnerabilities such as illegitimate packet injection, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) scanning attack, Zigbee frame counter-attack, etc., regarding IP, Bluetooth and Zigbee devices. To understand how resilient is IoT for DoS, we propose two new metrics to measure the Resilience and the Quality of Service (QoS) degradation in IoT. We have conducted large-scale experimentation with real IoT devices in our security IoT testbed. The experiments conducted are for DoS, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) by setting up Mirai and Permanent Denial of Service (PDoS) using BrickerBot on various IoT devices. We have also compared our framework with the existing state of the art tools. Received on 10 February 2019, accepted on 02 April 2019, published on 29 April 2019