An experimental study of IoT networks under internal routing attack

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) deployments mostly relies on the establishment of Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) among a large number of constraint devices. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) provides an effective IPv6-based LLN routing protocol, namely the IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Network (RPL). RPL provides adequate protection against external security attacks but stays vulnerable to internal routing attacks such as a rank attack. Malicious RPL nodes can carry out a rank attack in different forms and cause serious network performance degradation. An experimental study of the impact of the decreased rank attack on the overall network performance is presented in this paper. In also besides, it is important to understand the main influencing factors in this context. In this study, several some many network scenarios were considered with varying network sizes, attacker properties, and topological setups. The experimental results indicate a noticeable adverse effect of the rank attack on the average PDR, delay, ETX, and beacon interval. However, such impact was varied according to network size, attacker position, attacker neighbor count, number of attack-affected nodes, and overall hops increase. The results give a practical reference to the overall performance of RPL networks under rank attacks.