Securing Smart Homes via Software-Defined Networking and Low-Cost Traffic Classification

IoT devices have become popular targets for various network attacks due to their lack of industry-wide security standards. In this work, we focus on the classification of smart home IoT devices and defending them against Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The proposed framework protects smart homes by using VLAN-based network isolation. This architecture includes two VLANs: one with non-verified devices and the other with verified devices, both of which are managed by a SDN controller. Lightweight, stateless flow-based features, including ICMP, TCP and UDP protocol percentage, packet count and size, and IP diversity ratio, are proposed for efficient feature collection. Further analysis is performed to minimize training data to run on resource-constrained edge devices in smart home networks. Three popular machine learning models, including K-Nearest-Neighbors, Random Forest, and Support Vector Machines, are used to classify IoT devices and detect different DDoS attacks based on TCP-SYN, UDP, and ICMP. The system’s effectiveness and efficiency are evaluated by emulating a network consisting of an Open vSwitch, Faucet SDN controller, and flow traces of several IoT devices from two different testbeds. The proposed framework achieves an average accuracy of 97%in device classification and 98% in DDoS detection with average latency of 1.18 milliseconds.