Biblio

Although 6LoWPAN has brought about a revolutionary leap in networking for Low-power Lossy Networks, challenges still exist, including security concerns that are yet to answer. The most common type of attack on 6LoWPANs is the network layer, especially routing attacks, since the very members of a 6LoWPAN network have to carry out packet forwarding for the whole network. According to the initial purpose of IoT, these nodes are expected to be resource-deficient electronic devices with an utterly stochastic time pattern of attachment or detachment from a network. This issue makes preserving their authenticity or identifying their malignity hard, if not impossible. Since 6LoWPAN is a successor and a hybrid of previously developed wireless technologies, it is inherently prone to cyber-attacks shared with its predecessors, especially Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) and WPANs. On the other hand, multiple attacks have been uniquely developed for 6LoWPANs due to the unique design of the network layer protocol of 6LoWPANs known as RPL. While there exist publications about attacks on 6LoWPANs, a comprehensive survey exclusively on RPL-specific attacks is felt missing to bold the discrimination between the RPL-specific and non-specific attacks. Hence, the urge behind this paper is to gather all known attacks unique to RPL in a single volume.

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is considered as the backbone of Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Authentication is the most important phase that guarantees secure access to such networks but it is more critical than that in traditional Internet because the communications are established between constrained devices that could not compute heavy cryptographic primitives. In this paper, we are studying with real experimentation the efficiency of HIP Diet EXchange header (HIP DEX) protocol over IPv6 over Low Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) in IoT. The adopted application layer protocol is Constrained Application Protocol (CoAP) and as a routing protocol, the Routing Protocol for Low power and lossy networks (RPL). The evaluation concerns the total End-to-End transmission delays during the authentication process between the communicating peers regarding the processing, propagation, and queuing times' overheads results. Most importantly, we propose an efficient handshake packets' compression header, and we detailed a comparison of the above evaluation's criteria before and after the proposed compression. Obtained results are very encouraging and reinforce the efficiency of HIP DEX in IoT networks during the handshake process of constrained nodes.