The Impact of DoS Attacks onResource-constrained IoT Devices:A Study on the Mirai Attack
This study addresses security challenges for resource-constrained IoT devices, highlighting vulnerabilities that could hinder their adoption, but it is incremental as it builds on existing analysis of Mirai with new experimental data.
The paper analyzed the Mirai malware's impact on resource-constrained IoT devices by simulating Denial-of-Service attacks, finding that compromised devices consumed 38.44% more energy during UDP floods and victim devices used 64.6% more storage for reading and 55.45% more for writing during TCP floods.
Mirai is a type of malware that creates a botnet of internet-connected devices, which can later be used to infect other devices or servers. This paper aims to analyze and explain the Mirai code and create a low-cost simulation environment to aid in the dynamic analysis of Mirai. Further, we perform controlled Denial-of-Service attacks while measuring resource consumption on resource-constrained compromised and victim Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices, such as energy consumption, CPU utilization, memory utilization, Ethernet input/output performance, and Secure Digital card usage. The experimental setup shows that when a compromised device sends a User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood, it consumes 38.44% more energy than its regular usage. In the case of Secure Digital usage, the victim, when flooded with Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) messages, uses 64.6% more storage for reading and 55.45% more for writing. The significant extra resource consumption caused by Mirai attacks on resource-constrained IoT devices can severely threaten such devices' wide adoption and raises great challenges for the security designs in the resource-constrained IoT environment.