Wormhole attack prevention mechanism for RPL based LLN network

Smart metering application has received a lot of attention from the research community lately. Usually, LLN based network runs on RPL protocol which constructs a DAG structure for its normal operation. In this paper, we devise a wormhole attack scenario in such a network. Furthermore, we propose a Merkle tree based authentication protocol which runs on the notion of constructing a tree of hashed security information. We evaluated the approach by formulating the wormhole problem as graph theoretic problem and have shown the effectiveness of the proposed Merkle tree based approach for authenticating communications. Furthermore, we perform simulations in NS 2 to observe the network performance by adopting Merkle tree based to prevent from disrupting the links and observed boost in throughput, reduction in jitter and end to end delay. In the end, we have taken the step towards optimizing the performance of the algorithm by proposing an effective tree traversal algorithm which works on the notion of electing nodes as root in a large scale network from where a Merkle tree will be originated this will assist in managing the authentication in a huge sized network broken down into many trees avoiding wormhole attacks in the network.