A Consensus Framework for Reliability and Mitigation of Zero-Day Attacks in IoT

Abstract

“Internet of Things” (IoT) bridges the communication barrier between the computing entities by forming a network between them. With a common solution for control and management of IoT devices, these networks are prone to all types of computing threats. Such networks may experience threats which are launched by exploitation of vulnerabilities that are left unhandled during the testing phases. These are often termed as “zero-day” vulnerabilities, and their conversion into a network attack is named as “zero-day” attack. These attacks can affect the IoT devices by exploiting the defense perimeter of the network. The existing solutions are capable of detecting such attacks but do not facilitate communication, which affects the performance of the network. In this paper, a consensus framework is proposed for mitigation of zero-day attacks in IoT networks. The proposed approach uses context behavior of IoT devices as a detection mechanism followed by alert message protocol and critical data sharing protocol for reliable communication during attack mitigation. The numerical analysis suggests that the proposed approach can serve the purpose of detection and elimination of zero-day attacks in IoT network without compromising its performance.