Research Area:  Internet of Things

Abstract:

Security of the Internet of Things is a crucial topic, due to the criticality of the networks and the sensitivity of exchanged data. In this paper, we target the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol used in IoT environments for communication between IoT devices. We exploit a specific weakness of MQTT which was identified during our research, allowing the client to configure the behavior of the server. In order to validate the possibility to exploit such vulnerability, we propose SlowITe, a novel low-rate denial of service attack aimed to target MQTT through low-rate techniques. We validate SlowITe against real MQTT services, considering both plain text and encrypted communications and comparing the effects of the threat when targeting different daemons. Results show that the attack is successful and it is able to exploit the identified vulnerability to lead a DoS on the victim with limited attack resources.

Keywords:  

Author(s) Name:  Ivan Vaccari ,Maurizio Aiello and Enrico Cambiaso

Publisher name:  MDPI

DOI:  10.3390/s20102932

Volume Information:  Volume 20 ,Issue 10

Paper Link:   https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/10/2932