Biblio

Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) run on resource-constrained devices and play a key role in many Industrial Internet of Things and Cyber-Physical Systems based applications. But, achieving an energy-efficient routing in LLNs is a major challenge nowadays. This challenge is addressed by Routing Protocol for Low-power Lossy Networks (RPL), which is specified in RFC 6550 as a “Proposed Standard” at present. In RPL, a client node uses Destination Advertisement Object (DAO) control messages to pass on the destination information towards the root node. An attacker may exploit the DAO sending mechanism of RPL to perform a DAO Insider attack in LLNs. In this paper, it is shown that an aggressive attacker can drastically degrade the network performance. To address DAO Insider attack, a lightweight defense solution is proposed. The proposed solution uses an early blacklisting strategy to significantly mitigate the attack and restore RPL performance. The proposed solution is implemented and tested on Cooja Simulator.

The “Internet of Things” (IoT) is internetworking of physical devices known as 'things', algorithms, equipment and techniques that allow communication with another device, equipment and software over the network. And with the advancement in data communication, every device must be connected via the Internet. For this purpose, we use resource-constrained sensor nodes for collecting data from homes, offices, hospitals, industries and data centers. But various vulnerabilities may ruin the functioning of the sensor nodes. Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is a standardized, secure routing protocol designed for the 6LoWPAN IoT network. It's a proactive routing protocol that works on the destination-oriented topology to perform safe routing. The Sinkhole is a networking attack that destroys the topology of the RPL protocol as the attacker node changes the route of all the traffic in the IoT network. In this paper, we have given a survey of Sinkhole attacks in IoT and proposed different methods for preventing and detecting these attacks in a low-power-based IoT network.

Low power and lossy networks (LLNs) devices resource-constrained nature make it difficult to implement security mechanisms to defend against RPL routing attacks. RPLs inbuilt security functions are not efficient in preventing a wide majority of routing attacks. RPLs optional security schemes can defend against external attacks, but cannot mitigate internal attacks. Moreover, RPL does not have any mechanism to verify the integrity of control messages used to keep topology updated and route the traffic. All these factors play a major role in increasing the RPLs threat level against routing attacks. In this paper, a comparative literature review of various researchers suggesting security mechanisms to mitigate security attacks aimed at RPL has been performed and methods have been contrasted.

A significant segment of the Internet of Things (IoT) is the resource constrained Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs). The communication protocol used in LLNs is 6LOWPAN (IPv6 over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Network) which makes use of RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol over Low power and Lossy network) as its routing protocol. In recent times, several security breaches in IoT networks occurred by targeting routers to instigate various DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks. Hence, routing security has become an important problem in securing the IoT environment. Though RPL meets all the routing requirements of LLNs, it is important to perform a holistic security assessment of RPL as it is susceptible to many security attacks. An important attribute of RPL is its rank property. The rank property defines the placement of sensor nodes in the RPL DODAG (Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graphs) based on an Objective Function. Examples of Objective Functions include Expected Transmission Count, Packet Delivery Rate etc. Rank property assists in routing path optimization, reducing control overhead and maintaining a loop free topology through rank based data path validation. In this paper, we investigate the vulnerabilities of the rank property of RPL by constructing an Attack Graph. For the construction of the Attack Graph we analyzed all the possible threats associated with rank property. Through our investigation we found that violation of protocols related to rank property results in several RPL attacks causing topological sub-optimization, topological isolation, resource consumption and traffic disruption. Routing security essentially comprises mechanisms to ensure correct implementation of the routing protocol. In this paper, we also present some observations which can be used to devise mechanisms to prevent the exploitation of the vulnerabilities of the rank property.