A Study of RPL Attacks and Defense Mechanisms in the Internet of Things Network

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a technology that has evolved to make day-to-day life faster and easier. But with the increase in the number of users, the IoT network is prone to various security and privacy issues. And most of these issues/attacks occur during the routing of the data in the IoT network. Therefore, for secure routing among resource-constrained nodes of IoT, the RPL protocol has been standardized by IETF. But the RPL protocol is also vulnerable to attacks based on resources, topology formation and traffic flow between nodes. The attacks like DoS, Blackhole, eavesdropping, flood attacks and so on cannot be efficiently defended using RPL protocol for routing data in IoT networks. So, defense mechanisms are used to protect networks from routing attacks. And are classified into Secure Routing Protocols (SRPs) and Intrusion Detection systems (IDs). This paper gives an overview of the RPL attacks and the defense mechanisms used to detect or mitigate the RPL routing attacks in IoT networks.