Smart Home Defense Against DDoS Attacks

A smart home uses notifications to notify the user of events that have occurred in the home via mobile devices such as smartphones. Some events are important, and the user must be notified about them immediately. The functionality of a smart home can be disrupted by various attacks. Such attacks also include a DDoS attack when the household network is usually completely overwhelmed and any communication in the network is interrupted. An attacker can conduct a more sophisticated DDoS attack on only one IoT device, while the effort is to overwhelm only one IoT device and thus disable only part of the smart home services. In this article, the behavior of the system during a targeted DDoS attack on the device is experimentally demonstrated on one of the latest control units for managing the smart home, Fibaro Home Center 3, and the ability of the smart home to continue sending important notifications to the user without using cloud services is monitored. A countermeasure against such a targeted DDoS attack is proposed, which will allow the owner of a smart home to continue receiving notifications about activities in the home.