Analysis of Blockchain-Based Techniques for the Mitigation of DDoS Attacks in IoT Devices

Despite the pervasiveness of the Internet of Things (IoT) as a result of its widespread adoption across multiple industries including healthcare, agriculture etc., these devices continue to suffer from significant shortcomings. Their structural limitations coupled with the lack of security implementations make IoT devices highly vulnerable, especially to Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, thus serving as an ideal tool for botnet manifestation. Despite the development of increasingly efficient defense mechanisms, there is a continual rise in the frequency and scale of such attacks which continues to outperform these countermeasures. The inherent characteristics of Blockchain, combined with the significant potential of smart contracts to be used for whitelisting, blacklisting, identity management, and traffic monitoring mechanisms, make this technology stand out as a promising candidate for developing mitigation strategies against different types of DDoS attacks. This paper presents a thorough analysis of IoT devices, their architecture, and their limitations. It aims to comprehensively examine DDoS mitigation solutions in three areas: prevention of device & network compromise, detection-based mechanisms, and reaction-based solutions while studying the integration of Blockchain, with other technologies like SDN, Fog Computing, Machine Learning etc.