Effective mitigation against IoTs using super materials for distributed denial of service attacks in cloud computing

Computing technology has a key role to play in growing IT services. However, attacks can put the availability of the IT services in danger. One such deadliest attack is IoT based Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. The use of super materials like Graphene, Carbon nanotubes, Molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) etc. are revolutionizing the manufacturing of new Internet of Things (IoTs). These super materials are flexible, light weight, high performing and thus allows to expand the range of IoTs. Moreover, the growth of vulnerable IoT devices are increasing at an alarming rate. The bot herders take the control of these vulnerable IoT devices and launch massive DDoS attacks against the cloud systems. This leads to unavailability of the services and economic or reputation losses. A mirai botnet exploited large number of IoT devices and successfully executed the largest DDoS attack of this kind. Hence, it is very important to mitigate these attacks and lower its impact. There are various captcha based strategies (like text based, audio based, video based etc.) for blocking the traffic generated by bots towards the victim. These blocking techniques for mitigation are inflexible, expensive and time consuming. In this paper we propose a novel approach based on gesture verification for effective mitigation of DDoS attacks. The clients are challenged with captcha based on gesture verification. The IoT devices are not capable of making gestures for passing the challenge. Gestures can be simply drawing a circle or a line etc. The IoT devices generating attack are blocked and legitimate users pass the challenge and thus access the services. The proposed method is fast and is less expensive than the state-of-the-art methods. (C) 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.