The propagation approach of a botnet largely dictates its formation, establishing a foundation of bots for future exploitation. The chosen propagation method determines the attack surface and, consequently, the degree of network penetration, as well as the overall size and the eventual attack potency. It is therefore essential to understand propagation behaviours and influential factors in order to better secure vulnerable systems. Whilst botnet propagation is generally well studied, newer technologies like IoT have unique characteristics which are yet to be thoroughly explored. In this paper, we apply the principles of epidemic modelling to IoT networks consisting of wireless sensor nodes. We build IoT-SIS, a novel propagation model which considers the impact of IoT-specific characteristics like limited processing power, energy restrictions, and node density on the formation of a botnet. Focusing on worm-based propagation, this model is used to explore the dynamics of spread using numerical simulations and the Monte Carlo method to discuss the real-life implications of our findings.
Internet of Things (IoT) devices have become increasingly widespread. Despite their potential of improving multiple application domains, these devices have poor security, which can be explored by attackers to build large-scale botnets. In this work, we propose a host-based approach to detect botnets in IoT devices, named IoTDS (Internet of Things Detection System). It relies on one-class classifiers, which model only the legitimate device behaviour for further detection of deviations, avoiding the manual labelling process. The proposed solution is underpinned by a novel agent-manager architecture based on HTTPS, which prevents the IoT device from being overloaded by the training activities. To analyse the device’s behaviour, the approach extracts features from the device’s CPU utilisation and temperature, memory consumption, and number of running tasks, meaning that it does not make use of network traffic data. To test our approach, we used an experimental IoT setup containing a device compromised by bot malware. Multiple scenarios were made, including three different IoT device profiles and seven botnets. Four one-class algorithms (Elliptic Envelope, Isolation Forest, Local Outlier Factor, and One-class Support Vector Machine) were evaluated. The results show the proposed system has a good predictive performance for different botnets, achieving a mean F1-score of 94% for the best performing algorithm, the Local Outlier Factor. The system also presented a low impact on the device’s energy consumption, and CPU and memory utilisation.
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