RPL rank based-attack mitigation scheme in IoT environment

摘要

Due to the new technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT), connected objects have become smart interactive devices. However, despite their imminent advantages, whether for the daily life of users or in professional contexts, and the various security solutions proposed in literature in particular, the security of IoT networks is still a paramount issue given to the amount of confidential data that circulates through these technologies. In other words, among the IoT protocols that suffer from security issues, routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) is considered to be one of the most widely used protocols in the deployment of constrained IoT networks with limited resources (storage and energy constraints for example). On this basis, this article investigates in the first part a security flaw in the RPL protocol by carrying out an attack against the rank value of the RPL in an IoT environment. In the second part, a mitigation scheme to avoid it using a trust threshold is proposed. The malicious behavior of the attack and the effectiveness of the proposed scheme were assessed by detailed simulations using the Cooja simulator, in terms of successful detection rate, average network hops and global energy consumption. To conclude, a fair comparison between the different simulation results has been adopted using the Friedman statistical test, and a discussion has been presented with some future works concerning security against rank attack.