SDN-based In-network Honeypot: Preemptively Disrupt and Mislead Attacks in IoT Networks

Abstract: Detecting cyber attacks in the network environments used by Internet-of-things (IoT) and preventing them from causing physical perturbations play an important role in delivering dependable services. To achieve this goal, we propose in-network Honeypot based on Software-Defined Networking (SDN) to disrupt and mislead adversaries into exposures while they are in an early stage of preparing an attack. Different from traditional Honeypot requiring dedicated hardware setup, the in-network Honeypot directly reroutes traffic from suspicious nodes and intelligently spoofs the network traffic to them by adding misleading information into normal traffic. Preliminary evaluations on real networks demonstrate that the in-network Honeypot can have little impacts on the performance of IoT networks.