Security explorations for routing attacks in low power networks on internet of things

Abstract

The routing protocol for low power and lossy networks works as an effective method for communication in Contiki. However, many security attacks exist in RPL. These attacks affect the traffic or energy of the network. This paper focused on the persistent explorations of Contiki-based IoT networks to examine the effect of three well-known security attacks that exist on RPL. The RPL security attacks are named as: hello flood attack, decreased rank attack and increased version attack. The impact of these security attacks has been evaluated for scalability, energy efficiency and destination-oriented directed acyclic graph construction over simulated IoT networks in Contiki. All three aforesaid attacks are found to be responsible for affecting the DODAG construction, rising the network traffic and power consumption in one way or the other. To investigate the impact of attacks particularly on the scalability, the simulations are accomplished using eight different scenarios. It is found that the throughput of the network increases with the rise in the number of normal nodes (N) up to a critical point, at which N has optimum value. It is found that at N = 40, the critical point appears for many categories in different attacks. Like, “resdm” and “resem” categories possess this critical point through hello flood attack. Similarly, the “rdsdm” category has maximum throughput at N = 40 through increased version attack. Likewise, the decreased rank attack brought this critical point at N = 40 for categories “rdsem” and “resem”. The simulation results show that regardless of the attacks “rese” and “rdse” categories produce more throughput than “resd” and “rdsd” categories. This work also demonstrates the effect of the size of heterogenous packets on multiple throughput metrics.