Heimdall: Mitigating the Internet of Insecure Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) is built of many small smart objects continuously connected to the Internet. This makes these devices an easy target for attacks exploiting vulnerabilities at the network, application, and mobile level. With that it comes as no surprise that distributed denial of service attacks leveraging these vulnerable devices have become a new standard for effective botnets. In this paper, we propose Heimdall, a whitelist-based intrusion detection technique tailored to IoT devices. Heimdall operates on routers acting as gateways for IoT as a homogeneous defense for all devices behind the router. Our experimental results show that our defense mechanism is effective and has minimal overhead.