A Trust-Integrated RPL Protocol to Detect Blackhole Attack in Internet of Things

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) offers communication between user-to-machine and machine-to-machine. Due to their inherent characteristics of open medium, very dynamic topology, lack of infrastructure and lack of centralized management authority, IoT present serious vulnerabilities to security attacks. The routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) does not have an inherent mechanism to detect routing attacks. Popular among these IoT attacks is blackhole attack. An attacker can exploit the routing system of RPL to launch blackhole attack against an IoT network. To secure IoT networks from blackhole attack, trust-integrated RPL protocol (TRPL) is proposed and implemented. The trust system is embedded in the RPL protocol to detect and isolate a blackhole attack while optimizing network performance. The trust is calculated from successful interaction between two nodes. The calculated trust value is considered in parent selection. TRPL demonstrates its superior performance over the standard RPL protocol and existing techniques in the detection and isolation of blackhole attacks.