Contiki-based mitigation of UDP flooding attacks in the Internet of things

As Internet of things (IoT) continue to ensconce into our homes, offices, hospitals, electricity grids and other walks of life, the stakes are too high to leave security to chance. IoT devices are resource constrained devices and hence it is very easy to exhaust them of their resources or deny availability. One of the most prominent attacks on the availability is the Distributed Denial of service (DDoS) attack. Although, DDoS is not a new Internet attack but a large number of new, constrained and globally accessible IoT devices have escalated the attack surface beyond imagination. This paper provides a broad anatomy of IoT protocols and their inherent weaknesses that can enable attackers to launch successful DDoS attacks. One of the major contributions of this paper is the implementation and demonstration of UDP (User Datagram Protocol) flood attack in the Contiki operating system, an open-source operating system for the IoT. This attack has been implemented and demonstrated in Cooja simulator, an inherent feature of the Contiki operating system. Furthermore, in this paper, a rate limiting mechanism is proposed that must be incorporated in the Contiki OS to mitigate UDP flood attacks. This proposed scheme reduces CPU power consumption of the victim by 9% and saves the total transmission power of the victim by 55%.