An analysis of the Gateway Integrity Checking Protocol from the perspective of Intrusion Detection Systems

Internet of Things (IoT) gateways bridging resource-constrained devices and the internet, running conventional operating systems and communication protocols, are valuable targets for malicious attackers. Once compromised, the gateway can no longer be trusted to deliver data accurately to the applications running on the Cloud. In this work we present an analysis of the Gateway Integrity Checking Protocol, a gossip protocol that collects data from subsets of IoT devices, to answer a challenge sent by an External Security Agent. The response is used to check the integrity of data arriving at the Cloud from the gateway. The evaluation of the time and energy overhead, and the impact of the proposed solution on the lifetime of the network through simulations is presented. A detailed qualitative comparison against other Intrusion Detection Systems in the IoT domain is made, showing that the proposed solution can provide customizable security levels with little overhead in terms of processing power and network traffic.