Sybil attack in IOT: Modelling and defenses

Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging paradigm in information technology (IT) that integrates advancements in sensing, computing and communication to offer enhanced services in everyday life. IoTs are vulnerable to sybil attacks wherein an adversary fabricates fictitious identities or steals the identities of legitimate nodes. In this paper, we model sybil attacks in IoT and evaluate its impact on performance. We also develop a defense mechanism based on behavioural profiling of nodes. We develop an enhanced AODV (EAODV) protocol by using the behaviour approach to obtain the optimal routes. In EAODV, the routes are selected based on the trust value and hop count. Sybil nodes are identified and discarded based on the feedback from neighbouring nodes. Evaluation of our protocol in ns-2 simulator demonstrates the effectiveness of our approach in identifying and detecting sybil nodes in IoT network.