Trust-Based Detection Strategy Against Replication Attacks in IoT

Abstract

The integration of 6LoWPAN standard in the Internet of Things (IoT) has been emerging and applied in many domains such as smart transportation and healthcare. However, given the resource constrained nature of nodes in the IoT, 6LoWPAN is vulnerable to a variety of attacks, among others, replication attack can be launched to consume the node’s resources and degrade the network’s performance. This paper therefore proposes a trust-based detection strategy against replication attacks in IoT, where a number of replica nodes are intentionally inserted into the network to test the reliability and response of witness nodes. We further assess the feasibility of the proposed detection strategy and compare with other two strategies of brute-force and first visited with a thorough simulation, taking into account the detection probability for compromised attacks and the execution time of transactions. The simulation results show that the proposed trust-based strategy can significantly increase the detection probability to 90% on average against replication attacks, while within the number of nodes up to 1000 the detection runtime on average keeps around 60 s.