There is a concern about possible threats deriving from the widespread adoption of IoT (Internet of Things). The number of devices connected to the Internet is going to increase dramatically, potentiating their security risks. A Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack is a good candidate to explore IoT security vulnerabilities, because of the enormous number of new devices connected to the Internet there is also an increase in the number of possible compromised devices. This study aims to analyze the efficiency of a DDoS attack in a typical IoT environment, by using simulations that, in the best of our knowledge, have not been conducted yet.

The use of Internet of Things (IoT) is rapidly growing and a huge amount of data is being generated by IoT devices. Cloud computing is a natural candidate to handle this data since it has enough power and capacity to process, store and control data access. Moreover, this approach brings several benefits to the IoT, such as the aggregation of all IoT data in a common place and the use of cloud services to consume this data and provide useful applications. However, enforcing user privacy when sending sensitive information to the cloud is a challenge. This work presents and evaluates an architecture to provide privacy in the integration of IoT and cloud computing. The proposed architecture, called PROTeCt—Privacy aRquitecture for integratiOn of internet of Things and Cloud computing, improves user privacy by implementing privacy enforcement at the IoT devices instead of at the gateway, as is usually done. Consequently, the proposed approach improves both system security and fault tolerance, since it removes the single point of failure (gateway). The proposed architecture is evaluated through an analytical analysis and simulations with severely constrained devices, where delay and energy consumption are evaluated and compared to other architectures. The obtained results show the practical feasibility of the proposed solutions and demonstrate that the overheads introduced in the IoT devices are worthwhile considering the increased level of privacy and security.