The DAO Induction Attack Against the RPL-based Internet of Things

Abstract

We present a new attack against IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL), the emerging routing standard for the Internet of Things (IoT). In the proposed attack, a compromised node periodically transmits a special control message. Each of these crafted control messages induces many nodes in the network to transmit in response. We show that these redundant transmissions significantly increase the power consumption of nodes, hence reduce the lifetime of battery operated IoT devices. In addition, we show that the attack severely impacts end-to-end latency, and packet delivery ratio, two important network performance metrics. For instance, in a network with 50 nodes, our simulation results show that the attack increases the average end-to-end latency and packet loss ratio by 350% and 160%, respectively. To detect the attack, we propose a lightweight solution.