RIoT: A Rapid Exploit Delivery Mechanism against IoT Devices Using Vehicular Botnets

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) are designed to provide traffic safety by enabling vehicles to broadcast information-such as speed, location and heading-through inter-vehicular communications to proactively avoid collisions. However, one powerful threat against VANETs is vehicular botnets. In our earlier work, we demonstrated several powerful vehicular botnet attacks that can have damaging impacts on the security and privacy of VANETs. In this paper, we present RIoT-the first attack in the literature against Internet of Things (IoT) devices using vehicles-and demonstrate that vehicular botnets are threats not only to VANETs, but also to other important systems and networks. We show via simulation that RIoT can compromise up to 87 percent of the IoT devices in an area of interest within a short amount of time, by taking advantage of the mobility and collective communication range of vehicular bots.