Ivycide: Smart Intrusion Detection System Against E-IoT Driver Threats

The rise of Internet of Things (IoT) devices has led to the proliferation of smart environments worldwide. Although commodity IoT devices are employed by ordinary end users, complex environments, such as smart buildings, government, or private offices, or conference rooms require customized and highly reliable IoT solutions. Enterprise IoT (E-IoT) connect such environments to the Internet and are professionally managed solutions usually offered by dedicated vendors As E-IoT systems require specialized training, closed-source software, and proprietary equipment to deploy. In effect, E-IoT systems present an unprecedented, under-researched, and unexplored threat vector for an attacker. In this work, we focus on E-IoT drivers, software modules used to integrate devices into E-IoT systems, as an attack mechanism. We first present PoisonIvy, a series of generalized proof-of-concept attacks used to demonstrate that an attacker can use a malicious driver to perform denial-of-service attacks, gain remote control, and abuse E-IoT system resources. To defend against E-IoT driver-based threats, we introduce Ivycide, a novel intrusion detection system used to detect unexpected E-IoT network traffic from an E-IoT system. Ivycide operates as a passive monitoring system within an E-IoT system using machine learning and signature-based classification to detect Poisonivy attacks. We evaluated the performance of Ivycide in a realistic E-IoT deployment. Our detailed evaluation results show that Ivycide achieves an average accuracy of 97% in classifying the type of Poisonivy attack and operates without modifications or operational overhead to the existing E-IoT systems.