RSS based multistage statistical method for attack detection and localization in IoT networks

Abstract

Accurate and reliable positioning of nodes is a must for location-based services (LBS) in the Internet of things (IoT) networks. The LBS are ubiquitous and an easy target for non-cryptographic attacks that traditional security methods cannot address. In this work, we detect the Received Signal Strength (RSS) based attacks that affect the localization of smart devices in the IoT networks and report the attack tolerance of popular IoT protocols. A two-tier ratio metric method and Residue Under Curve (RUC) metric method is utilized to detect the malicious node in the IoT protocols. We propose to use a novel Geometric, and Arithmetic Mean (GM–AM) ratio as a feature to detect the RSS attacks where GM follows strictly Schur-Concavity property and AM follows non-strict concavity property. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method on real-world IoT testbeds with Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi), Zigbee, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and Long-Range Wide-Area Network (LoRaWAN) protocols using the RSS values of these opportunistic signals. Also, the effect of RSS attacks on the localization for different protocols is investigated, and we report the method that provides the least localization error under these attacks.