A lightweight defence against the Packet in Packet attack in ZigBee networks

ZigBee is a standard for low-power, low-rate wireless communication. It is modeled on the physical layer and medium access control defined in IEEE 802.15.4. In this paper, we study an attack on modern radios called the “Packet in Packet” (PIP) attack. We replicate the attack in ZigBee devices and discuss possible defenses against the attack. We implement a solution to thwart the PIP attack in TinyOS and show through extensive experiments that the solution defends against the attack, while imposing little additional overhead.