An Experimental Study of Distributed Denial of Service and Sink Hole Attacks on IoT based Healthcare Applications

With the rapid growth of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) in healthcare and the challenging task of achieving communication between two devices working on different protocols, concerns about the security of its devices also become an essential aspect. Amelioration in healthcare infrastructure in developing economies increases cost-effective medical devices, high research and development investments by major medical companies, and growing IoT infrastructure in health care. Since the communication is wireless and consists of low latency-based sensors and actuators, they are susceptible to frequent attacks. Two of the most common attacks are the DDoS (Distributed Denial of service) and Sinkhole attack, which are discussed in context to AODV and RPL protocols, usually employed for wireless-based IoT healthcare applications. We present network models under such attacks and depict their impact on the network parameters, namely, throughput, delay and packet delivery ratio. Our article presents an experimental study on the impacts of DDoS and Sinkhole attacks and suggests detection strategies on the basis of channel congestion and energy consumption for an IoT-based healthcare network.