FR-WARD: Fast Retransmit as a Wary but Ample Response to Distributed Denial-of-Service Attacks from the Internet of Things

While the Internet of Things (IoT) becomes increasingly popular and ubiquitous, IoT devices often remain unprotected and can be exploited to launch large-scale distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. One could attempt to employ traditional DDoS defense solutions, but these solutions are hardly suitable in IoT environments since they seldom consider the resource constraints of IoT devices. We present FR-WARD, a system that defends against DDoS attacks launched from an IoT network. FR-WARD operates close to potential attack sources at the gateway of an IoT network and drops packets to throttle any DDoS traffic that attempts to leave the IoT network. However, in order to properly react to traffic too difficult to categorically label as good or bad, FR-WARD employs a novel response based on the fast retransmit and flow control mechanisms of the Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) which minimizes the energy consumption and network latency of benign IoT devices within the policed network. Based on our mathematical analysis, simulation, and experimental evaluation, FR-WARD not only effectively mitigates DDoS traffic, but also minimizes the number of retransmitted packets and the connection durations of benign IoT devices. In fact, FR-WARD can successfully mitigate both naive flood attacks and smarter DDoS attacks that follow TCP congestion control but still reduce overhead caused by retransmitted packets for benign IoT devices by a up to a factor of 150.