Defending against Flooding Attacks in the Internet of Drones Environment

Even though drones are still in the infancy period in terms of widespread adoption and use, they have already pierced through solid conventional barriers in various domains of industry. As the usage of drones is becoming commonplace, a next generation aerial communication paradigm, Internet of Drones (IoD), has been proposed to further explore drone technology in a broad scope. IoD relies on the mobility of drones and intermittent drone-to-drone (D2D) and drone-to-ground station (D2I) communications for information sharing and exchange. Because of high mobility and resource constraints, IoD is defenseless to flooding attacks where an adversary sends an excessive amount of packets (original or replica) to legitimate drones with the intention of draining the limited IoD resources (i.e., communication bandwidth and drones' storage space). In this paper, we propose a lightweight distributed detection scheme, hereafter referred to as Lids, to defend against flooding attacks in the IoD environment. The basic idea of Lids is that each drone counts the number of packets that it has sent within a predefined time interval and shares the self-counting report with other drones during contacts. The receiving drones store the self-counting reports while flying and send them to nearby ground station which will check the consistency of self-counting reports to detect flooding attacks. For performance evaluation, we implement Lids and its counterparts (i.e., DAFA and LFADefender) in OMNeT++ network simulator and conduct extensive experiments in terms of detection ratio, miss detection ratio, detection latency, as well as energy consumption. Our experimental results indicate the superior performance of Lids to defend against flooding attacks in the IoD environment.