Protecting RESTful IoT Devices from Battery Exhaustion DoS Attacks

Abstract

Many IoT use cases involve constrained batterypowered devices offering services in a RESTful manner to their communication partners. Such services may involve, e.g., costly computations or actuator/sensor usage, which may have significant influence on the power consumption of the service Providers. Remote attackers may excessively use those services in order to exhaust the Providers' batteries, which is a form of a Denial of Service (DoS) attack. Previous work proposed solutions based on lightweight symmetric authentication. These solutions scale poorly due to requiring pre-shared keys and do not provide protection against compromised service Requesters. In contrast, we consider more powerful attackers even capable of compromising legit Requesters. We propose a method that combines attacker detection and throttling, conducted by a third trusted Backend, with a lightweight authentication protocol. For attacker detection and throttling, we propose a novel approach using rate limitation algorithms. In addition, we propose and formally verify two authentication protocols suitable for different, widely used IoT network topologies. Our protocols ensure service availability for benign Requesters even if Providers are under a battery exhaustion attack. The protocols do neither require pre-shared keys between Requesters and Providers, nor the usage of asymmetric cryptography and public key infrastructures on the Provider. This makes our protocols suitable for a variety of IoT deployments involving constrained devices and constrained networks. We demonstrate the feasibility of our method through a simulation and a proof of concept implementation.

Mitigating Denial of Service Attacks in RPL-Based IoT Environments: Trust-Based Approach

“…The basic idea in all solutions that belong to this category is to detect anomalies in behavior such as, sending too many RPL control messages in a given time period. Examples of approaches that belong to this category are [63] and [64]. Authentication approaches utilize lightweight authentication schemes using either symmetric or asymmetric keys to identify requests from legitimate nodes.…”

“…The impact of these attacks on edge IoT nodes was demonstrated by Ioulianou et al [63] and their simulations showed that node activity has increased from 35% during normal operation to 50% during an attack for affected nodes. However, one of the limitations of most of the these studies is that their simulations, if any, are small scale simulations with simplistic scenarios to show the significant impact on battery drain [47], [63], [64].…”

Survey on Enterprise Internet-of-Things Systems (E-IoT): A Security Perspective

“…Rate Limiting solutions [106] articles [54]. For instance, malware inserted into vendor websites or devices can "trojanize" devices before the devices leave the supply chain.…”

“…In situations where devices may be homogeneous, defenses against battery exhaustion attacks can be based on comparing these devices to create a realistic baseline and find anomalies that may be effective in wireless sensors and interfaces [105]. Finally, work by Hristozov et al using rate limiting approaches to defend against battery exhaustion attacks reported to be successful for devices supporting RESTful services [106].…”

IoT Network Security: Requirements, Threats, and Countermeasures

“…Rate limiting: Authors in [122] proposed rate-limiting to prevent such attack. However, identifying such a single threshold for devices using network data is challenging.…”