REATO: REActing TO denial of service attacks in the Internet of Things

Denial of Service (DoS) attack represents until now a relevant problem in Internet-based contexts. In fact, it is both difficult to recognize and to counteract. Along with the adoption and diffusion of Internet of Things (IoT) applications, such an issue has become more urgent to solve, due to the presence of heterogeneous data sources and to the wireless nature of most communications. A DoS attack is even more serious if not only the data sources are under attack, but also the IoT platform itself, which is in charge of acquiring data from multiple data sources and, after data processing, provide useful services to the interested users. In this paper, we present a solution, named REATO, for actively and dynamically detecting and facing DoS attacks within a running IoT middleware. A real prototype has been realized in order to validate the proposed method, by assessing different relevant parameters.