Securing RPL-based Internet of Things applied for water pipeline monitoring

Abstract

In recent years, Internet of things has attracted attention worldwide due to the recent technological improvements. The main motive of Internet of things (IoT) is to make devices in the world to be connected through internet, so that they can share information automatically. However, many security problems have emerged. Therefore, a great deal of research work is to propose solutions to increase the level of security in IoT applications. The majority of these applications are based on RPL as a routing protocol. RPL should have unmodified routing data to ensure integrity, and verify that routing data comes from authorized machines to validate the authenticity. In this paper, we propose a security scheme applied to RPL-based internet of things routing protocol. It is based on identity-based cryptography to distribute symmetric keys between communicating nodes, AES128 and SHA 256 to compute message authentication codes. As application, we consider the water pipeline monitoring while maintaining low power consumption. For simulation and performance evaluation, we use CONTIKI operating system and the simulation tool Cooja. We demonstrate that our scheme is lightweight and does not introduce high memory and energy overheads. Then, constrained IoT devices can support it while avoiding many routing attacks.