A Distributed & Lightweight Framework to Secure IoT Networks Against Network Layer Attacks

With the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), sensor and actuator networks, subsequently referred to as IoT networks (IoTNs), are proliferating at an unprecedented rate in several newfound areas such as smart cities, health care, and transportation, and consequently, securing them is of paramount importance. In this paper, we present NLSec, a fully distributed and lightweight framework that can detect arbitrary network layer (NL) attacks in any given IoTN, localize (i.e., identify) the compromised nodes, and mitigate the attacks by isolating the compromised nodes automatically. We also present insights obtained from an exploratory study on the effects of NL attacks on IoTNs, which guided us in designing NLSec. We demonstrate the effectiveness of NLSec through extensive experiments on a real IoTN test-bed under three well-known NL attacks.