SlowTT: A slow denial of service against IoT networks

Abstract

The security of Internet of Things environments is a critical and trending topic, due to the nature of the networks and the sensitivity of the exchanged information. In this paper, we investigate the security of the Message Queue Telemetry Transport (MQTT) protocol, widely adopted in IoT infrastructures. We exploit two specific weaknesses of MQTT, identified during our research activities, allowing the client to configure the KeepAlive parameter and MQTT packets to execute an innovative cyber threat against the MQTT broker. In order to validate the exploitation of such vulnerabilities, we propose SlowTT, a novel "Slow" denial of service attack aimed at targeting MQTT through low-rate techniques, characterized by minimum attack bandwidth and computational power requirements. We validate SlowTT against real MQTT services, by considering both plaintext and encrypted communications and by comparing the effects of the attack when targeting different application daemons and protocol versions. Results show that SlowTT is extremely successful, and it can exploit the identified vulnerability to execute a denial of service against the IoT network by keeping the connection alive for a long time.