IoT for Defense and National Security

14Bringing Intelligence at the Network Data Plane for Internet of Things Security

Qiaofeng Qin, Konstantinos Poularakis, and Leandros Tassiulas

Department of Electrical Engineering & Institute for Network Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) can aid modern military operations in various ways; from immersive virtual simulations for soldiers' training to autonomous vehicles and environmental sensors for situation awareness and distributed decision making. Yet, security threats arising in massively connected IoT devices continue to challenge their widespread adoption by the Army. It is necessary to equip IoT gateways with firewalls to prevent hacked devices from infecting a larger number of network nodes. Meanwhile, cutting‐edge Software Defined Network (SDN) technologies open the door for greater innovation to network control and data planes. The match‐and‐action mechanism of SDN provides the means to differentiate malicious traffic flows from normal ones, which mirrors the past firewall mechanisms but with a new flexible and dynamically re‐configurable twist. However, vulnerabilities of IoT devices and heterogeneous protocols coexisting in the same network challenge the extension of SDN into the IoT domain. To overcome these challenges, we leverage data‐plane programming languages that enable intelligent packet processing, and propose two novel data‐driven approaches for attack detection. First, we design a two‐stage deep learning method ...