Resolving Threats in IoT: ID Spoofing to DDoS

Internet-of-Things (IoT) is a resource-constrained network with machines low on power, processing and memory capabilities. Resource constraints in IoT impact the adoption of protocols for design and validation of unique identity (ID) for every machine. Malicious machines spoof ID to pose as administrative machines and program their neighbour systems in the network with malware. The cycle of ID spoofing and infecting the IP-enabled devices with malware creates an entire network popularly termed as the Botnet. In this paper, we study 6LoWPAN and ZigBee for DDoS and ID spoofing vulnerabilities. We propose a design for generation and validation of ID on such systems called Pseudo Random Identity Generator (PRIG). We compare the performance of PRIG-adapted 6LoWPAN with 6LoWPAN in a simulated personal area network (PAN) model under DDoS stress and demonstrate a 93% reduction in ID validation time as well as an improvement of 67% in overall throughput.