Scheme for preventing low-level denial-of-service attacks on wireless sensor network-based home automation systems

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Remote access to home automation systems (HASs) through the Internet creates the potential for malicious users from across the Internet to attack the HASs. One such threat is that of a denial-of-service (DoS) attack that may disrupt communications or block remote access to the HASs. Existing approaches for DoS defence are generic and are not capable of filtering out all attack traffic, so a small amount of attack traffic reaches an HAS. This small level of attack traffic poses a significant threat to the HAS that are increasingly comprised of resource-limited wireless sensor networks (WSNs). This study proposes implements and evaluates a novel defence strategy designed to work alongside existing approaches for DoS defence to overcome the aforementioned shortcomings. The proposed defence strategy consists of three entities, the virtual home, remote home server and DoS defence server. The experimental results show that the proposed strategy can filter low-level attack traffic and thereby protect low-resource networks, such as WSN-based HASs.