IoT devices are notoriously vulnerable even to trivial attacks and can be easily compromised. In addition, resource constraints and heterogeneity of IoT devices make it impractical to secure IoT installations using traditional endpoint and network security solutions. To address this problem, we present IoT-Keeper, a lightweight system which secures the communication of IoT. IoT-Keeper uses our proposed anomaly detection technique to perform traffic analysis at edge gateways. It uses a combination of fuzzy C-means clustering and fuzzy interpolation scheme to analyze network traffic and detect malicious network activity. Once malicious activity is detected, IoT-Keeper automatically enforces network access restrictions against IoT device generating this activity, and prevents it from attacking other devices or services. We have evaluated IoT-Keeper using a comprehensive dataset, collected from a real-world testbed, containing popular IoT devices. Using this dataset, our proposed technique achieved high accuracy (≈0.98) and low false positive rate (≈0.02) for detecting malicious network activity. Our evaluation also shows that IoT-Keeper has low resource footprint, and it can detect and mitigate various network attacks - without requiring explicit attack signatures or sophisticated hardware.

The growing popularity of Internet-of-Things (IoT) has created the need for network-based traffic anomaly detection systems that could identify misbehaving devices. In this work, we propose a lightweight technique, IoTguard, for identifying malicious traffic flows. IoTguard uses semi-supervised learning to distinguish between malicious and benign device behaviours using the network traffic generated by devices. In order to achieve this, we extracted 39 features from network logs and discard any features containing redundant information. After feature selection, fuzzy C-Mean (FCM) algorithm was trained to obtain clusters discriminating benign traffic from malicious traffic. We studied the feature scores in these clusters and use this information to predict the type of new traffic flows. IoTguard was evaluated using a real-world testbed with more than 30 devices. The results show that IoTguard achieves high accuracy (>98%), in differentiating various types of malicious and benign traffic, with low false positive rates. Furthermore, it has low resource footprint and can operate on OpenWRT enabled access points and COTS computing boards.