Sinkhole attack detection and avoidance mechanism for RPL in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

The security issue is one of the main problems in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) and Internet of Things (IoTs). RPL (Routing protocol for low power and lossy networks) is a standard routing protocol for WSN, is not to be missed from being attacks. The performance of RPL is reduced significantly after being attacked. Sinkhole attack is one of the most common attacks to WSN and RPL, threatening the network capability by discarding packets and disrupting routing paths. Therefore, this paper proposes a new Secured-RPL routing protocol to detect and avoid sinkhole attacks in the network, which is called Cross Layers Secured RPL (CLS-RPL). This routing protocol is enhanced of the existing RPL routing protocol. CLS-RPL is a cross-layer routing protocol that uses information from the data link layer in its security mechanism. CLS-RPL uses a new technique and concept in detecting a sinkhole attack that is based on eave-listening (overhearing) that allows a child node to eave-listening its parent transmission. If the child node does not hear any transmission from its parent node after sending several packets, this means its parent node is a sinkhole attacker. Otherwise, if the node hears transmission from its parent node, this means that its parent node is legitimate and continues to send more packets. CLS-RPL implements a simple security mechanism that provides a high packet delivery ratio. The finding shows that CLS-RPL provides 52% improvement in terms of packet delivery ratio when compared to RPL protocol.