Cyber-attack Mitigation and Impact Analysis for Low-power IoT Devices

Abstract: Recent years have seen exponential development in wireless sensor devices and their rebirth as IoT, as well as increased popularity in wireless home devices such as bulbs, fans, and microwave. As they can be used in various fields such as medical devices, environmental studies, fire department or military application, etc., security of these low powered devices will always be a concern for all the user and security experts. Users nowadays want to control all these "smart" wireless home devices through their smartphones using an internet connection. Attacks such as distributed attacks on these devices will render the whole system vulnerable as these attacks can record and extract confidential information as well as increase resource (energy) consumption of the entire network. In this paper, we propose a cyber-attack detection algorithm and present an impact analysis of easy-to-launch cyber-attacks on a low-power mote (Z1 Zolertia) as a model IoT device. We also present detailed results of power consumption analysis with and without attack along with when the mitigation algorithm for intrusion detection is implemented.