Mitigating Denial of Service Attacks in RPL-Based IoT Environments: Trust-Based Approach

In domains such as telehealth, intelligent transportation, and autonomous agriculture, ensuring secure routing of collected and exchanged data is paramount. Since its inception, there have been many research challenges for the RPL routing protocol that operates in resource-constrained environments and utilizes battery-powered IoT devices. Hence, researchers have focused on this crucial challenge by advising solutions to mitigate attacks that deplete nodes’ energy and hence create energy gaps in the network. In this article, we study the impact of two energy exhaustion attacks (hello flooding and version number modification) on the RPL protocol and we present a novel mitigation solution based on behavioural trust. We present an in-depth study of the impact on radio energy consumption of the hello flooding and version number modification attacks in RPL as the number of network nodes increases. We showed that the impact of the former is localized to nodes in the vicinity of the attacker while the latter has a global impact that extends to the entire network. The obtained results from our simulations show that version number modification attack in particular has devastating impact on the network. We also propose a trust-based solution to mitigate these attacks and demonstrate its effectiveness. Accordingly, we conduct comparative study of these attacks and empirically investigate their impact on network performance by running extensive evaluation experiments. Our findings verify the effectiveness of our proposed trust system in mitigating both attacks.