Distributed Middlebox Architecture for IoT Protection

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is not one single entity, but a collection of different devices, communication technologies, protocols and services. IoT systems can span a large number of individually managed networks that are interconnected through the Internet and host the different components of an IoT application, such as sensor devices, storage servers and data processing services. Protecting such a complex multiparty system from abuse becomes a very challenging task. New difficulties arise everyday when policies are updated or new collaborations and federations appear between entities. Moreover, hacked IoT devices can also become the source of powerful attacks, as the Mirai malware has demonstrated, and therefore a danger for the other involved parties. In this paper, we propose an approach to improve the management and protection of collaborating IoT systems using distributed intrusion detection and permission-based access control. Our approach is based on interconnected middleboxes that monitor the communication between the various IoT networks and are able to stop incoming as well as outgoing attacks. We evaluate our approach through experiments with different types of attacks.