Smart home anomaly-based IDS: architecture proposal and case study

Abstract

The complexity and diversity of the technologies involved in the Internet of Things (IoT) challenge the generalization of security solutions based on anomaly detection, which should fit the particularities of each context and deployment and allow for performance comparison. In this work, we provide a flexible architecture based on building blocks suited for detecting anomalies in the network traffic and the application-layer data exchanged by IoT devices in the context of Smart Home. Following this architecture, we have defined a particular Intrusion Detector System (IDS) for a case study that uses a public dataset with the electrical consumption of 21 home devices over one year. In particular, we have defined ten Indicators of Compromise (IoC) to detect network attacks and two anomaly detectors to detect false command or data injection attacks. We have also included a signature-based IDS (Snort) to extend the detection range to known attacks. We have reproduced eight network attacks (e.g., DoS, scanning) and four False Command or Data Injection attacks to test our IDS performance. The results show that all attacks were successfully detected by our IoCs and anomaly detectors with a false positive rate lower than 0.3%. Signature detection was able to detect only 4 out of 12 attacks. Our architecture and the IDS developed can be a reference for developing future IDS suited to different contexts or use cases. Given that we use a public dataset, our contribution can also serve as a baseline for comparison with new techniques that improve detection performance.