An Analysis of Blockchain-Based IoT Sensor Network Distributed Denial of Service Attacks

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) and blockchain are emerging technologies that have attracted attention in many industries, including healthcare, automotive, and supply chain. IoT networks and devices are typically low-powered and susceptible to cyber intrusions. However, blockchains hold considerable potential for securing low-power IoT networks. Blockchain networks provide security features such as encryption, decentralisation, time stamps, and ledger functions. The integration of blockchain and IoT technologies may address many of the security concerns. However, integrating blockchain with IoT raises several issues, including the security vulnerabilities and anomalies of blockchain-based IoT networks. In this paper, we report on our experiments using our blockchain test bed to demonstrate that blockchains on IoT platforms are vulnerable to DDoS attacks, which can also potentially lead to device hardware failures. We show that a number of anomalies are visible during either a DDoS attack or IoT device failure. In particular, the temperature of IoT hardware devices can exceed 90 °C during a DDoS attack, which could lead to hardware failure and potential fire hazards. We also found that the Block Transaction Rate (BTR) and network block loss percentage can increase due to corrupted hardware, with the BTR dropping to nearly zero blocks/sec and a block loss percentage of over 50 percent for all evaluated blockchains, and as high as 81.3 percent in one case. Our experiments demonstrate that anomalous temperature, latency, bandwidth, BTR, and network block loss percentage can potentially be used to identify DDoS attacks.

Keywords

• blockchain
• Internet of Things
• vulnerabilities
• anomalies
• security
• low-power