Protecting IoTs from Mirai Botnet Attacks Using Blockchains

Abstract

The exponential growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices with limited computing resources and poor security configurations make them vulnerable to different cyber-attacks. Mirai Botnet malware exploits vulnerabilities of IoT devices resulting in massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Various techniques have been proposed to mitigate Mirai botnet attacks, but most of them are centralized or just provide precautionary steps to secure the IoT devices. This paper addresses IoT security against Mirai Botnet attacks using a novel blockchain based architecture. In our proposed approach, the network is divided into different Autonomous Systems (AS), through which host connectivity is established. Blockchains are used to store and share a list of Internet Protocol (IP) addresses of different hosts connected to an AS, indicating which of these have been identified as malicious. Every AS monitors the communication activity inside the network using the proposed approach and determines whether a host is infected with malware or not by comparing the total number of packets sent by the host with a specified threshold value. The proposed approach is simulated on a custom developed simulator which is used to determine a suitable value for the malicious threshold. The results indicate that the proposed solution works effectively in blocking malicious packets from the infected host so that they do not affect the response time of the victim. Furthermore, a scalability analysis is conducted and the block propagation delay is evaluated for different AS sizes and consensus algorithms.