Intelligent VNF Placement to Mitigate DDoS Attacks on Industrial IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) has undergone rapid popularization, reaching a wide range of application domains, such as manufactures. Hence, more and more heterogeneous IoT devices have been deployed in a variety of industrial environments, progressively becoming common objects to the supply chain. The physical infrastructure of manufacturing systems has become complex and requires efficient and dynamic solutions for managing network performance and security. Network Function Virtualization (NFV) has attracted attention when the intention is to respond to security threats on Industrial IoT (IIoT). Few works use NFV to detect and mitigate security threats on IIoT networks, but even less consider performance indicators of the network context when placing the Virtual Network Functions (VNFs). Thus, this work introduces a Machine Learning (ML) approach to place security VNFs based on NFV performance to mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks on IIoT. Experiments considering a new composed data set and diverse ML techniques show ML classification as an alternative for IIoT scenarios, achieving, according to the best-performing technique, 99.40% of accuracy in relation to the ideal placement. To facilitate the reproduction of the work, all the code and data produced are publicly available.