Impersonation Attack Detection in IoT Networks

Abstract

The deployment of Internet of Things (IoT) networks is growing at an extraordinary speed from last decade and has expanded the interconnection of billions of nodes, providing a range of flexible communication and computing services, etc. We note that this significant expansion of the IoT surface has expanded the attack surfaces and is a danger to companies of every size from security aspects. The IoT devices are easy to compromise and therefore the attacker can easily act as an impersonator to impersonate other legitimate IoT nodes. This is known as impersonation attacks or spoofing attacks in wireless IoT networks. In this paper, we propose a new methodology to detect an impersonation attack in IoT networks. We use Mahalanobis Distance correlation theory based two-stage attack detection model to resist IoT node spoofing. The approach is evaluated on cloud platforms and is compared with the recent state-of-the-art literature. The proposal is deployed as a pluggable module in cloud networks. The key metrics of our evaluation and comparisons are accuracy with respect to the varying size of the IoT network, classification metrics, attack detection time, and CPU utilization.