Improving Internet of Things (IoT) Security with Software-Defined Networking (SDN)

TLDR

The rapid expansion of IoT devices has heightened security concerns, yet security is frequently neglected during product development, prompting exploration of SDN as a promising solution to enhance IoT network security. The study proposes a system model that integrates SDN with IoT networks and introduces a mitigation strategy for HTTP‑based man‑in‑the‑middle attacks. The authors implement the model on Raspberry Pi with Kodi Media Center and OpenFlow, demonstrating its feasibility. Evaluation results show that the proposed technique is more resilient to cyber‑attacks.

Abstract

There has been an increase in the usage of Internet of Things (IoT), which has recently become a rising area of interest as it is being extensively used for numerous applications and devices such as wireless sensors, medical devices, sensitive home sensors, and other related IoT devices. Due to the demand to rapidly release new IoT products in the market, security aspects are often overlooked as it takes time to investigate all the possible vulnerabilities. Since IoT devices are internet-based and include sensitive and confidential information, security concerns have been raised and several researchers are exploring methods to improve the security among these types of devices. Software defined networking (SDN) is a promising computer network technology which introduces a central program named ‘SDN Controller’ that allows overall control of the network. Hence, using SDN is an obvious solution to improve IoT networking performance and overcome shortcomings that currently exist. In this paper, we (i) present a system model to effectively use SDN with IoT networks; (ii) present a solution for mitigating man-in-the-middle attacks against IoT that can only use HTTP, which is a critical attack that is hard to defend; and (iii) implement the proposed system model using Raspberry Pi, Kodi Media Center, and Openflow Protocol. Our system implementation and evaluations show that the proposed technique is more resilient to cyber-attacks.