An intelligent and lightweight intrusion detection mechanism for RPL routing attacks by applying automata model

Abstract

ABSTRACT Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy network (RPL) offers a set of mechanisms to attain efficient communication over resource-limited heterogeneous IoT environments. RPL attacks downgrade the network performance by disrupting the optimal protocol structure. So it is crucial to develop lightweight security solutions to detect such attacks and maximize the RPL performance. This paper designs an intelligent and lightweight IDS model named RPL Attacks based on Intrusion Detection for Efficient Routing (RAIDER) to reinforce security of RPL routing mechanism. RAIDER addresses the lack of security over RPL by analyzing the impacts of four RPL attacks using simulation, incorporates an automata theory with the IDS nodes to scrutinize the node behavior and to diminish the impact of such attacks. The IDS nodes monitor the network and periodically transplant the observed information as different states based on the finite automata theory. RAIDAR takes attack decisions based on the state transitions pre-estimated threshold of context-aware attack decision-making model and detects RPL attacks. RAIDER improves the RPL routing performance with minimum energy consumption. The Contiki Cooja-based simulation results demonstrate the efficiency of the RAIDER in terms of the packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, delay, overhead, attack detection accuracy, and network lifetime.