Detection of Energy Consumption Cyber Attacks on Smart Devices

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, intelligent systems are increasingly finding their way into everyday life and people’s homes. With the spread of these technologies, there is a growing concern about the security of smart home devices. Smart home devices suffer from resource-constrained problems, and these devices and sensors could be connected to unreliable and untrustworthy networks. Nevertheless, securing IoT technology is mandatory due to the relevant data handled by these devices. One of the critical tasks to be solved by the concept of a modern smart home is the problem of preventing energy attacks spread and the usage of IoT infrastructure. One of the possible approaches to abnormal behavior of IoT devices and IoT cyberattack detection is monitoring energy consumption. Moreover, building a lightweight algorithm for securing IoT devices is essential to consider the limitation of its resources. This paper presents a lightweight technique for detecting energy consumption attacks on smart home devices based on analyzing the received packets by the smart devices. The proposed algorithm considers three different protocols, TCP, UDP, and MQTT, and different device statuses, like Idle, active, and when it is under attack. Moreover, it considers the resource constraints of the smart devices for detecting abnormal behaviors and sending an alert to the administrator as soon as the attack is detected. The proposed approach effectively detects energy consumption attacks by measuring the packet reception rate of the smart devices for different protocols.