HONEYSCOPE: IoT Device Protection with Deceptive Network Views

Abstract

The emergence of IoT has brought many new device manufacturers to the market providing novel products with network connectivity. Unfortunately, many of these new entrants to the market lack security engineering experience and focus heavily on time-to-market. As a result, many home and office networks contain IoT devices with security flaws and no clear path for security updates, making them attractive targets for attacks, e.g., recent IoT-centric malware such as Mirai. In this chapter, we discuss a network centric approach to protecting vulnerable IoT devices. We describe a system called HoneyScope, which seeks to achieve two goals. First, each IoT device has a different view of its local network, which limits the damage when a device is compromised. Second, virtual IoT devices are created to confuse and deceive attacker with sophisticated motivations (e.g., fake WiFi connected cameras). To achieve these goals, HoneyScope uses an SDN-based security gateway to create virtualized views of the network and nodes therein providing fine-grained control over the communications that individual devices may have.