Abstract
Destination Advertisement Objects (DAOs) are sent upward by RPL nodes toward the DODAG root, to build the downward routing paths carrying traffic from the root to its associated nodes. This routing mechanism can be exploited by a malicious node periodically transmitting a large volume of DAO messages towards its parent, which in turn will forward such messages to its own parent and so on, until they arrive at the Direction-Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) root. This ultimately results in a negative effect on network performance in terms of energy consumption, latency and reliability. The first objective of this paper is to evaluate the effect of such a DAO attack in the context of an RPL IoT network. In particular, identifying the particular performance metrics and network resources affected most greatly. The second objective is the proposal of mitigating security mechanisms in relation to DAO attacks and to evaluate their effectiveness. The simulation results have shown how the attack can damage the network performance by significantly increasing the DAO overhead and power consumption. It also demonstrated that the DAO attack affect the reliability of the downward traffic under specific conditions. The proposed mechanisms showed a good capacity in restoring the optimal performance of the network by up to 205%, 181%, 87% and 6%, in terms of overhead, latency, power consumption and packet delivery ratio respectively.
Highlights
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a generic term used to describe network devices and things that are interconnected
To cater for such limited resources, the Routing Over Low-power and Lossy Networks (RoLL) working group of the IETF investigated the capacity of common routing protocols to satisfy the routing requirements of the Low-power and Lossy Network (LLN)
The group reached the conclusion that such can meet the special routing requirements of LLN, and, introducing what they named as the Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) [2], [3].The security features of RPL have been investigated extensively in research, indicating that there are
Summary
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a generic term used to describe network devices and things that are interconnected. Another factor that increases the effectiveness of the attack is that in RPL under storing mode the transmission of DAO messages follows the upward direction towards the sink, and the scope of damage increases beyond area of the attacker node [3], [15] These consequences downgrade the network performance with respect to routing overhead, power consumption, latency and PDR, which significantly shorten the network lifetime [16]. To address this issue, we extended our previous work in [17] in which we proposed a solution to mitigate the aforementioned attack.
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