Firmware-Based DoS Attacks in Wireless Sensor Network

Firmware-Based DoS Attacks in Wireless Sensor Network

연구 분야: Analysis

학회: European Symposium on Research in Computer Security

IoT devices are projected to scale up to hundreds of billions by 2030 due to its applications in agriculture, healthcare, environment, manufacturing, energy transition, and other industries. However, it raises many cybersecurity concerns as well. Typically, the firmware of IoT devices can include security vulnerabilities and software bugs. Once those devices are deployed, adversaries can exploit vulnerable code residing inside such devices for malicious intentions like DoS attacks. For example, memory corruption and long-run operations as vulnerable code can be exploited for DoS in a wireless sensor network. Attackers try to crash a running program through memory corruption in order to interrupt node availability and eventually pose DoS to a network. We define this attack vector as firmware-driven DoS attacks. In this paper, we demonstrate how firmware-based DoS exploits can be carried out in a wireless sensor network through simulating attack scenarios. In addition, we propose a defensive mechanism at network level that monitors the CPU load of nodes to switch its state. The results show that the proposed mechanism can preserve network lifespan and network availability in some scenarios.