Secure-MQTT: an efficient fuzzy logic-based approach to detect DoS attack in MQTT protocol for internet of things

Abstract

The advancements in the domain of Internet of Things (IoT) accelerated the development of new communication technologies. Machine to machine communication in IoT is accomplished with application protocols such as the Constrained Application Protocol and Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT). The openness of these protocols leads to various types of attacks including DoS Attack. MQTT is widely used in secure IoT applications like health monitoring. One of the prominent attacks in IoT is the denial of service (DoS) attack. This enforces the need for an efficient intrusion detection system method in MQTT-based application. In this paper, we address the vulnerabilities in MQTT, through which intruders can control the low-configuration devices in the network. This paper proposes a lightweight fuzzy logic-based intrusion detection scheme called Secure-MQTT, for detecting malicious activity during the communication between IoT devices. The proposed method uses a fuzzy logic-based system to detect the malicious behavior of the node with the help of a fuzzy rule interpolation mechanism. Secure-MQTT avoids the use of a dense rule base by exploiting the fuzzy rule interpolation that generates rules dynamically. The proposed method provides an effective mechanism to protect the low configuration devices from the DoS attack. The simulation results show that the proposed method detects the attacks more accurately when compared to the existing methods.