Lightweight Security for IoT Systems leveraging Moving Target Defense and Intrusion Detection

As more and more devices have communication capabilities, our world is becoming increasingly interconnected. This paradigm is called the Internet of Things (IoT). Most IoT devices have limitations in memory, computing capacity, and energy, thus making impossible to integrate fully-fledged secured solutions into them. Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) and Moving Target Defense (MTD) are two acknowledged cyber defense techniques that have attracted researchers’ attention but need to fit within the constraints of IoT systems. In this paper, based on our previous MTD work, we propose an innode MTD strategy exhibiting hybrid (i.e., event- and time-based) movement. We specifically explore the MTD interaction with a lightweight detection mechanism to provide reactive defense on top of the by-design proactive-time-based MTD. We implemented and evaluated our proposal in a real IoT platform exposed to a Reduction-of-Quality (RoQ) attack by measuring the roundtrip time and packet-loss rate of the system in four scenarios. Notably, we compared our proposal against a time-based-only MTD alternative, which demonstrates the promising results of our hybrid strategy.