Secure IoT Routing: Selective Forwarding Attacks and Trust-based Defenses in RPL Network

Abstract

IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is an essential routing protocol to enable communications for IoT networks with low power devices. RPL uses an objective function and routing constraints to find an optimized routing path for each node in the network. However, recent research has shown that topological attacks, such as selective forwarding attacks, pose great challenges to the secure routing of IoT networks. Many conventional secure routing solutions, on the other hand, are computationally heavy to be directly applied in resource-constrained IoT networks. There is an urgent need to develop lightweight secure routing solutions for IoT networks. In this paper, we first design and implement a series of advanced selective forwarding attacks from the attack perspective, which can flexibly select the type and percentage of forwarding packets in an energy efficient way, and even bad-mouth other innocent nodes in the network. Experiment results show that the proposed attacks can maximize the attack consequences (i.e. number of dropped packets) while maintaining undetected. Moreover, we propose a lightweight trust-based defense solution to detect and eliminate malicious selective forwarding nodes from the network. The results show that the proposed defense solution can achieve high detection accuracy with very limited extra energy usage (i.e. 3.4%).

An Overview of Iot Architecture Security Issues and Countermeasures

“…So, an attacker selects a portion of the information and forwards it to the destination; the remaining are dropped [30]. Selective attacks can cause massive damage to networks in general, and especially to IoT networks with low-power IPL (Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy) networks [55]. This type of attack can remain undetected for a long time, which can damage a network.…”

“…Many secure routing solutions are too computationally heavy for direct application on resource-constrained IoT networks. Therefore, a lightweight, trust-based defense scheme is needed to prevent selective forwarding attacks [55]. It consists of three modules: detection, notification, and isolation.…”