In the context of Information-Centric Networking, Interest Flooding Attacks (IFAs) represent a new and dangerous sort of distributed denial of service. Since existing proposals targeting IFAs mainly focus on local information, in this paper we propose GNN4IFA as the first mechanism exploiting complex non-local knowledge for IFA detection by leveraging Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) handling the overall network topology.In order to test GNN4IFA, we collect SPOTIFAI, a novel dataset filling the current lack of available IFA datasets by covering a variety of IFA setups, including ~40 heterogeneous scenarios over three network topologies. We show that GNN4IFA performs well on all tested topologies and setups, reaching over 99% detection rate along with a negligible false positive rate and small computational costs. Overall, GNN4IFA overcomes state-of-the-art detection mechanisms both in terms of raw detection and flexibility, and - unlike all previous solutions in the literature - also enables the transfer of its detection on network topologies different from the one used in its design phase.

The attacks that leverage the side-channels produced by processes running on mobile and IoT devices are a concrete threat for cyber–physical systems. This special issue is focused on the most recent research work that investigates novel aspects of this topic. This editorial summarizes the contributions of the seven accepted papers for this special issue.