Blackhole Detection in 6LoWPAN Based Internet of Things: An Anomaly Based Approach

The Internet of things networks is vulnerable to many DOS attacks. Among them, Blackhole attack is one of the severe attacks as it hampers communication among network devices. In general, the solutions presented in the literature for Blackhole detection are not efficient. In addition, the existing approaches do not factor-in, the consumption in resources viz. energy, bandwidth and network lifetime. Further, these approaches are also insensitive to the mechanism used for selecting a parent in on Blackhole formation. Needless to say, a blackhole node if selected as parent would lead to orchestration of this attack trivially and hence it is an important factor in selection of a parent. In this paper, we propose SIEWE (Strainer based Intrusion Detection of Blackhole in 6LoWPAN for the Internet of Things) - an Intrusion detection mechanism to identify Blackhole attack on Routing protocol RPL in IoT. In contrast to the Watchdog based approaches where every node in network runs in promiscuous mode, SIEWE filters out suspicious nodes first and then verifies the behavior of those nodes only. The results that we obtain, show that SIEWE improves the Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) of the system by blacklisting malicious Blackhole nodes.