PROSE–Proactive Resilience in Internet of Things: Targeted Attacks and Countermeasures

Internet of Things (IoT) is the frontier of wireless networking and provides unprecedented control and information over the network. In particular, the advent of Industrial IoTs and the use of IoT in security and military have necessitated the need to respect stringent delay and reliability constraints, while IoTs promise innovative solutions but their evolution also poses some concerns, with security being the foremost. Due to the fact that these systems operate on sensitive data and are often involved in industrial production processes or critical battleground communication; therefore they are ideal targets for a range of network attacks. This paper explores the novel problem of the elimination of critical IoT nodes to minimize the data-carrying capacity of the IoT network resulting in denial of service. This paper proposes PROSE-a proactive network fortifying solution which focuses on designing resilient IoTs by proactively identifying critical nodes in the network so that they can be protected by installing backups. We assume a worst-case scenario with an adversary that has complete knowledge of the network topology and traffic patterns and can capture/disable a subset of nodes with the aim of minimizing the maximum network flow. PROSE contributes by proactively identifying the nodes that are most vulnerable to the throughput attack assuming a worst-case adversarial scenario and models the problem as a mixed integer linear program. In addition, we propose an efficient heuristic algorithm. Simulation results validate that PROSE efficiently identifies the most vulnerable IoT nodes.