MTD, Where Art Thou? A Systematic Review of Moving Target Defense Techniques for IoT

• Published in: IEEE internet of things journal Vol. 8; no. 10; pp. 7818 - 7832
• Main Authors: Navas, Renzo E., Cuppens, Frederic, Boulahia Cuppens, Nora, Toutain, Laurent, Papadopoulos, Georgios Z.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Piscataway IEEE 15-05-2021; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: Bibliographies; Computer Science; Cryptography and Security; Cyber security; Cybersecurity; Entropy; Entropy (Information theory); Feasibility; Foundations; Internet of Things; Internet of Things (IoT); Literature reviews; Measurement; metrics; moving target defense (MTD); Moving targets; Networking and Internet Architecture; Proposals; Security; systematic literature review; Systematics; Taxonomy; Measurement; Moving Target Defense; Metrics; Systematics; Cyber Security; Bibliographies; Taxonomy; Systematic Literature Review; Entropy; Internet of Things
• ISSN: 2327-4662; 2372-2541; 2327-4662
• DOI: 10.1109/JIOT.2020.3040358

Context: Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems are increasingly deployed in the real world, but their security lags behind the state of the art of non-IoT systems. Moving target defense (MTD) is a cyberdefense paradigm, successfully implemented in conventional systems, that could improve IoT security. Objective: Identify and synthesize existing MTD techniques for IoT and validate the feasibility of MTD as a cybersecurity paradigm suitable for IoT systems. Method: We use a systematic literature review method to search and analyze existing MTD for IoT techniques up to July 2020. We evaluated the existing techniques in terms of security foundations and real-world deployability using the evidence they provide. We define and use entropy-related metrics to categorize them. This is the first MTD survey to use Shannon's entropy metric empirically. Results: Thirty-two distinct MTD for IoT techniques exist: 54% are Network-layer-based, 50% present strong evidence about their real-world deployment, and 64% have weak security foundations. Conclusion: MTD for IoT is a feasible cyberdefense approach. A variety of proposals exist, with evidence about their implementation and evaluation. Nevertheless, the MTD for IoT state of the art is still immature: the security foundations of most existing proposals are weak. Novel techniques should prioritize providing convincing security foundations and real-world deployment evidence.