SUTMS: Designing a Unified Threat Management System for Home Networks

The cultural shift of work from on-premises to remote home offices allows hackers to access corporate data by compromising devices attached to home-based broadband routers. Currently, home devices are growing at an exponential rate, e.g., in the form of smartphones, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and corporate laptops. Presently, there is a lack of cost-effective, practical, and lightweight Unified Threat Management (UTM) systems designed to protect home users from the wide range of existing cyber threats. This applied research article introduces a sophisticated Smart UTM System (SUTMS) that is designed to tackle the contemporary security issues encountered in home networks while running on a Raspberry Pi single-board computer. The proposed integrated SUTMS design consists of flow detection, intrusion detection, and firewall core engines, as well as optional routing and log collection engines. The flow detection engine in SUTMS discovers anomalies and detects the active protocols, which are a basis for signature optimization in the SUTMS intrusion detection system (IDS). By ingesting Indicator of Compromise (IoC) feeds, the SUTMS firewall engine provides dynamic anti-bot protection. Evaluations indicate that SUTMS with IDS signature optimization can provide 99% accuracy with approx. 55% memory utilization reduction compared to traditional signature-based IDS.