Robust detection of signaling DDoS threats for more secure machine type communications in next generation mobile networks
Raja Ettiane, Abdelaali Chaoub, Rachid Elkouch · 2018
Machine Type Communications (MTC) are emerging as a revolutionary paradigm in the present and future mobile generations, expected to experience an explosive growth in the next few years. This new concept will exhaust the control plan of mobile infrastructures by triggering excessive and heavy signaling procedures. In addition, MTC devices are vulnerable and can be exploited to launch distributed DOS (DDoS) attacks against the sensitive signaling plan, these security flaws are very tricky to be noticed. In this paper, we examine a new signaling DDoS attack that exploits the low duty-cycle of machine-to-machine (M2M) communications to saturate the mobile control plan capacity. To defend against this type of attacks, we propose a real-time cost-effective detection approach relying on the recurrence property of the Markov chain characterizing the M2M traffic evolution over time. Extensive simulation results show that the designed signaling DDoS attack will generate a considerable overwhelming signaling traffic leading to a severe availability issue in the critical mobile infrastructure. Besides, our proposed detection mechanism identifies successfully this signaling attack with a detection accuracy around 91% and a fast detection time capped at 380 seconds.