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Review
. 2022 Jan 31;22(3):1094.
doi: 10.3390/s22031094.

Blockchain Based Solutions to Mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks in the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey

Zawar Shah  1 , Imdad Ullah  2 , Huiling Li  3 , Andrew Levula  1 , Khawar Khurshid  4
Affiliations
Review

Blockchain Based Solutions to Mitigate Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) Attacks in the Internet of Things (IoT): A Survey

Zawar Shah et al. Sensors (Basel). .

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) devices are widely used in many industries including smart cities, smart agriculture, smart medical, smart logistics, etc. However, Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks pose a serious threat to the security of IoT. Attackers can easily exploit the vulnerabilities of IoT devices and control them as part of botnets to launch DDoS attacks. This is because IoT devices are resource-constrained with limited memory and computing resources. As an emerging technology, Blockchain has the potential to solve the security issues in IoT. Therefore, it is important to analyse various Blockchain-based solutions to mitigate DDoS attacks in IoT. In this survey, a detailed survey of various Blockchain-based solutions to mitigate DDoS attacks in IoT is carried out. First, we discuss how the IoT networks are vulnerable to DDoS attacks, its impact over IoT networks and associated services, the use of Blockchain as a potential technology to address DDoS attacks, in addition to challenges of Blockchain implementation in IoT. We then discuss various existing Blockchain-based solutions to mitigate the DDoS attacks in the IoT environment. Then, we classify existing Blockchain-based solutions into four categories i.e., Distributed Architecture-based solutions, Access Management-based solutions, Traffic Control-based solutions and the Ethereum Platform-based solutions. All the solutions are critically evaluated in terms of their working principles, the DDoS defense mechanism (i.e., prevention, detection, reaction), strengths and weaknesses. Finally, we discuss future research directions that can be explored to design and develop better Blockchain-based solutions to mitigate DDoS attacks in IoT.

Keywords: blockchain; distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks; internet of things (IoT); mitigation of DDoS attacks.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors do not declare any conflict of interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
A DDoS attack scenario in IoT networks as a Botnet to target legitimate servers.
Figure 2
Figure 2
The Chain of Transactions within Blockchain [29], (a). the architecture of Blockchain (b), and a sample Merkle Tree is also shown.
Figure 3
Figure 3
The signing and verification of messages (i.e., transaction data) in a Blockchain network.
Figure 4
Figure 4
Classification of the blockchain-based solutions to mitigate DDoS attacks in IoT.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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