A Novel Detection and Localization Scheme for Wormhole Attack in Internet of Things

With the explosive growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) has been widely studied and applied. However, due to lack of complete security mechanisms, it faces many threats, one of which is wormhole attack. Wormhole attack could mislead network traffic flow, cause network congestion and increase packet delivery latency. Besides, it can also be combined with the other types of attacks to become more threatening. In this article, we propose two schemes, called routing loop detection for wormhole and routing loop detection for wormhole combined with greyhole, to detect wormhole nodes for different attack modes in RPL-based networks. Our methods could not only detect but also localize the adversaries more effectively in comparison with the state-of-the-art scheme, LiDL. We have completely implemented the proposed two schemes, as well as LiDL, in the Contiki IoT operating system and made an extensive comparison among them based on the Sky mote. The obtained results demonstrate the feasibility and superiority of our schemes in terms of detection speed, accuracy and network performance improvement.