A Moving Target Defense Strategy for Internet of Things Cybersecurity

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) systems are becoming more common and present in our daily lives. The increase of Internet-connected devices has caused attackers to focus more their attention on these devices, and therefore, new and more sophisticated attacks to IoT systems are discovered every day. Currently, to ensure reliability and operability, most IoT systems are designed to operate in a relatively static configuration, among a highly heterogeneous environment. However, a system that does not continuously change its configurations, i.e., a static system, gives an advantage to attackers; with enough time and resources, an attacker will eventually find and exploit the vulnerabilities of any static target. This work proposes a Moving Target Defense (MTD) strategy that randomly shuffles the communication protocols through which a node communicates to a gateway in an IoT network. The system's configuration changes have an associated cost. The objective of the proposed MTD strategy in this work is to maintain a balance between the increase in system performance overhead, the increase in business impact (system unavailability) and, at the same time, the decrease in the probability of success of a given attack. To design this strategy, a framework has been proposed, this framework can be used to design any MTD strategy for IoT systems. The objective of the framework is to find, after several iterations, the MTD strategy parameters that achieve a balance between five different measurable variables of an IoT system.

IoDM: A Study on a IoT-Based Organizational Deception Modeling with Adaptive General-Sum Game Competition

“…Out of the above-mentioned related works, refs. [18,20,53,54,56,57] among previous game theory studies and [64,66] among previous IoT-enabled MTD studies provided the main inspirations for this study. Accordingly, to alleviate the above-mentioned limitations, we proposed IoDM, a systematic IoT deception model based on PBNE and BSSG and a partial signaling-based general sum game foreground and a POMDP state-transition background.…”

“…Kyi et al [65] proposed the directivity of proactive framework designs related to IP address shuffling in the IoT communication layer and code diversification in the data layer. Mercado et al [66] randomized the communication protocol between nodes and gateways in the IoT network to propose an MTD strategy and an architecture that minimizes the asymmetric spatiotemporal dominance of attackers and the defender's system performance overhead based on multiple-criteria decision analysis. Based on the previous studies, using the MTD strategy parameter, we could prove the levels of the efficiency of proactive defense against DDoS attacks targeting IoT networks and the conceptual approaches for future optimization based on game theories and genetic algorithms.…”

Risk and threat mitigation techniques in internet of things (IoT) environments: a survey

“…A very recent study (Mercado-Velázquez et al, 2021) targets specifically this trade-off, and proposes a framework that employs MTD by randomly shuffling the communication protocols between IoT nodes and an IoT gateway. The strategy proposed aims to balance the increased overhead resulting from the use of an MTD approach and its impact on system availability with minimising the chance attack success.…”

A Comprehensive Architectural Framework of Moving Target Defenses Against DDoS Attacks

“…Many research efforts have been devoted to developing efficient MTD mechanisms, architectures, and strategies. Existing efforts target specific technologies such as Cloud [43], Software Defined Networks (SDN) [42,[44][45][46], SCADA systems, and IoT [47]. Despite this diversity, most developed technologies share common procedural guidelines and stages.…”