An intrusion detection system for the prevention of an active sinkhole routing attack in Internet of things

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) is a complex and massive wireless network, where millions of devices are connected together. These devices gather different types of data from different systems that transform human daily lives by modernizing home appliances, business, medicine, traveling, research, and so on. Security is a critical challenge for a stable IoT network, for instance, routing attacks, especially sinkhole attack is a severe attack which has the capability to direct network data toward the intruder, and it can also disrupt and disconnect the devices from their network. The IoT needs multi-facet security solutions where network communication is protected with integrity, confidentiality, and authentication verification services. Therefore, the IoT network should be secured against intrusions and disruptions; the data exchanged throughout the network should be an encrypted form. In this article, an intrusion detection system for the prevention of an active sinkhole routing attack (PASR) in IoT is presented. The proposed PASR solves the problem of the sinkhole attack; for this purpose, the whole network is divided into the clusters of IoT. All the IoT devices are connected to their respective gateways. The gateway devices are equipped with an intrusion detection system. The intrusion detection system activates intrusion analyzer to detect anomalies in the context of ad hoc on-demand distance vector protocol. The base station is the main device that is responsible to receive data from all devices. Therefore, it detects and prevents sinkhole attacks; the base station keeps the record of all active devices and their possible links. The PASR is implemented and compared with the existing intrusion detection techniques ad hoc on-demand distance vector, and dual attack detection for black and gray hole attack. It was observed from the simulation results that the PASR outperforms in terms of data packet delivery, energy consumption, the detection rate of sinkhole attack, and routing overhead.