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DDoS attacks in IoT networks: a comprehensive systematic literature review

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Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly emerging technology in the consumer and industrial market. This technology has the potential to radically transform the consumer experience, as it will change our daily scenes, starting from the way we drink coffee to how smart objects interact with industrial applications. Such rapid development and deployment face multifarious challenges, including the sheer amount of data generated, network scale, network heterogeneity, as well as security and privacy concerns. In recent years, Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks in IoT networks are considered one of the growing challenges that need to be shed light on. DDoS attacks utilize the limited resources in IoT devices, such as storage limitation and network capacity, that cause this issue in the IoT application. This paper comprehensively reviews the attacks that can lead to DDoS, which eventually will cause serious damage to existing systems. Additionally, the paper investigates the available solutions used to counter these attacks and explore their limitations from the perspective of the constrained device. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the existing solution placement was implemented, including heterogeneity and their performance for IoT based networks. Finally, the paper will reveal and discuss interesting research direction on the future IoT security and current trends.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the University of Technology Sydney and the Centre for Artificial Intelligence in UTS. The authors are thankful for the funding entities.

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  1. School of Computer Science, Centre for Artificial Intelligence, University of Technology Sydney, Broadway, NSW, 2007, Australia

    Yahya Al-Hadhrami & Farookh Khadeer Hussain

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  1. Yahya Al-Hadhrami
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Correspondence to Yahya Al-Hadhrami.

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Al-Hadhrami, Y., Hussain, F.K. DDoS attacks in IoT networks: a comprehensive systematic literature review. World Wide Web 24, 971–1001 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-020-00855-2

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