Mitigation of DDoS Attack on Cloud Computing due to IoT Devices

Abstract

Over the years cloud computing users have increased drastically. In this escalated growth, smart devices have played a vital role. To coup up with this growth, researchers have introduced edge/fog computing at the edge of the network. Fog computing is not an alternative for cloud computing but an e ective complement. Fog computing provides a lot of bene ts for smart devices, however, it leads to a lot of security challenges as well. Access Control is one of the most fundamental and crucial security feature in deploying a secure system and is primary focus of this research. The dynamic nature of IoT devices combined with lack of proper security hardening leads to catastrophic results having huge impact. The DDoS attack launched on IoT devices by using Mirai malware lead to unavailability of services by major service providers namely Dyn, Twitter, the Guardian, Net ix, Reddit, CNN and many others in Europe and the US. In this research, we are proposing to use fog computing resources to provide authentication and access control. The devices will be authenticated by fog node and then connected to cloud. The fog node will monitor the behavior of connected devices and in case it observes malicious activity the connection between the device and node will be terminated. The experiments carried out to evaluate the proposed scheme shows promising results. We validated the proposed scheme based on NIST security criteria and by launching critical attacks from IoT devices. Additionally, in this research we have identi ed the security threats faced by a user in fog/ cloud enabled IoT devices environment. Next, we have proposed an access control model for this environment utilizing all the resources available. We have implemented this access control scheme where cloud resources are minimally utilized for the process of authentication and access control. The deployed Fog layer is used to provide these crucial security controls. From the results gathered in the performed experiments we have reached the conclusion that fog layer can be used to o oad security solutions.