Blockchain Based Solutions to Mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks in the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey.

Khawar Khurshid,Imdad Ullah,Huiling Li,Andrew Levula,Zawar Shah

doi:10.3390/s22031094

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are widely used in many industries including smart cities, smart agriculture, smart medical, smart logistics, etc. However, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks pose a serious threat to the security of IoT. Attackers can easily exploit the vulnerabilities of IoT devices and control them as part of botnets to launch DDoS attacks. This is because IoT devices are resource-constrained with limited memory and computing resources. As an emerging technology, Blockchain has the potential to solve the security issues in IoT. Therefore, it is important to analyse various Blockchain-based solutions to mitigate DDoS attacks in IoT. In this survey, a detailed survey of various Blockchain-based solutions to mitigate DDoS attacks in IoT is carried out. First, we discuss how the IoT networks are vulnerable to DDoS attacks, its impact over IoT networks and associated services, the use of Blockchain as a potential technology to address DDoS attacks, in addition to challenges of Blockchain implementation in IoT. We then discuss various existing Blockchain-based solutions to mitigate the DDoS attacks in the IoT environment. Then, we classify existing Blockchain-based solutions into four categories i.e., Distributed Architecture-based solutions, Access Management-based solutions, Traffic Control-based solutions and the Ethereum Platform-based solutions. All the solutions are critically evaluated in terms of their working principles, the DDoS defense mechanism (i.e., prevention, detection, reaction), strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we discuss future research directions that can be explored to design and develop better Blockchain-based solutions to mitigate DDoS attacks in IoT.

Highlights

With the rapid development of Internet of Things (IoT) technology, more and more fields have been involved in this industry, such as smart homes, smart cities, smart transportation, intelligent logistics management, etc. [1]
This paper aims to fill in this research gap by categorising and critically evaluating various Blockchain-based solutions to mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks in IoT
In order to qualify based on our search criteria, a selected article must satisfy the following conditions: (1). the published work must be within the IoT domain, (2). the IoT domain may be generic or application specific (e.g., Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)), (3). the considered scenario must be of DDoS, IoT and Blockchain, excluding all papers that do not either address DDoS attack scenarios or do not use Blockchain as the underlying technology, (4). it must have been published between 2016 and 2021, (5). exclude the review papers written in languages other than

Summary

Introduction

With the rapid development of IoT technology, more and more fields have been involved in this industry, such as smart homes, smart cities, smart transportation, intelligent logistics management, etc. [1]. There are still issues present in some areas related to IoT including security, privacy, identity management, etc. Among security issues, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks pose a serious threat [4]. Since most IoT devices are resource-constrained with limited memory and computing resources, security protection is lacking in these devices [5]. DDoS attacks aim to consume bandwidth or resources and prevent legitimate users from reaching the services [21,23,24]. Various researchers [21,24] discussed DDoS attacks on the three layers of the IoT architecture. The Layer-3 attacks aim to exhaust the victim’s resources with different methods, such as flooding attacks, reflection-based flooding attacks, protocol exploitation flooding attacks and amplification-based flooding attacks [24]. Applications with the potential to be attacked include DNS, HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP), Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), etc. [21]

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