Gotham Testbed: a Reproducible IoT Testbed for Security Experiments and Dataset Generation
The growing adoption of the Internet of Things (IoT) has brought a
significant increase in attacks targeting those devices. Machine learning (ML)
methods have shown promising results for intrusion detection; however, the
scarcity of IoT datasets remains a limiting factor in developing ML-based
security systems for IoT scenarios. Static datasets get outdated due to
evolving IoT architectures and threat landscape; meanwhile, the testbeds used
to generate them are rarely published. This paper presents the Gotham testbed,
a reproducible and flexible security testbed extendable to accommodate new
emulated devices, services or attackers. Gotham is used to build an IoT
scenario composed of 100 emulated devices communicating via MQTT, CoAP and RTSP
protocols, among others, in a topology composed of 30 switches and 10 routers.
The scenario presents three threat actors, including the entire Mirai botnet
lifecycle and additional red-teaming tools performing DoS, scanning, and
attacks targeting IoT protocols. The testbed has many purposes, including a
cyber range, testing security solutions, and capturing network and application
data to generate datasets. We hope that researchers can leverage and adapt
Gotham to include other devices, state-of-the-art attacks and topologies to
share scenarios and datasets that reflect the current IoT settings and threat
landscape.