SSH brute force attack mitigation in Internet of Things (IoT) network : An edge device security measure

With the explosive growth of IoT applications, billions of things are now connected via edge devices and a colossal volume of data is sent over the internet. Providing security to the user data becomes crucial. The rise in zero-day attacks are a challenge in IoT scenarios. With the large scale of IoT application detection and mitigation of such attacks by the network administrators is cumbersome. The edge device Raspberry pi is remotely logged using Secure Shell (SSH) protocol in 90% of the IoT applications. The case study of SSH brute force attack on the edge device Raspberry pi is demonstrated with experimentation in the IoT networking scenario using Intrusion Detection System (IDS). The IP crawlers available on the internet are used by the attacker to obtain the IP address of the edge device. The proposed system continuously monitors traffic, analysis the log of attack patterns, detects and mitigates SSH brute attack. An attack hijacks and wastes the system resources depriving the authorized users of the resources. With the proposed IDS, we observe 25% CPU conservation, 40% power conservation and 10% memory conservation in resource utilization, as the IDS, mitigates the attack and releases the resources blocked by the attacker.