Threats, Detection and Mitigation of Rank Attack: A Survey

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The Internet of Things (IoT) is the fastest growing collection of physical things (objects) entrenched with the technologies for sensing and exchanging information with other connected devices over the Internet. Latest technological advancements facilitated the resource constraint devices to use IP protocol stack. But, the global connectivity of heterogeneous resource constrained devices has made them susceptible to various attacks, which compromises the security and privacy of users. The Internet Engineering Task Force’s Routing Over Low power Lossy network (IETF’s ROLL) working group has presented the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Network (RPL), an efficient routing protocol to facilitate 6LoWPAN networks. The constrained resources in IoT expose RPL to various attacks that target the node’s constrained resources to affect the network’s performance. The rank in RPL supports route optimization, loop avoidance etc. Thus any attack on rank results in un-optimized routes, loop formation and control overhead which affect the network performance. This survey focuses on various rank attacks and their proposed detection and mitigations mechanisms. Open research issues specific to rank attack are also discussed.