Energy Depletion Attack in Low Power and Lossy Networks: Analysis and Defenses

With increasingly popular computing devices endowed with sensing and communicating capabilities, low power and lossy networks (LLNs) are rapidly emerging as an important part of ubiquitous computing and communication infrastructure. In order to support the vision of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and its applications, a novel routing protocol for low power and lossy networks, also referred to as RPL, has been proposed to provide efficient and reliable communication and enable the integration of resource-constrained devices into the Internet. However, due to the shared wireless medium, the lack of physical protection, and instinctive resource constraints, RPL-based LLNs are undeniably vulnerable to various Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks. In this paper, we propose a misbehavior-aware detection scheme, called MAD, against energy depletion attack in RPL-based LLNs, where a malicious node intentionally generates and sends a large number of packets to legitimate node to excessively consume the energy resource of intermediate nodes located along the forwarding path, and finally makes the resource-constrained network suffer from denial of service. In the MAD, each node maintains a count of the number of received packets from its child node within a specific time window, and then compares the count with a dynamically calculated threshold to detect potential energy depletion attack. We conduct extensive simulation experiments for performance evaluation and comparison with the original RPL with and without adversary, respectively. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is a viable approach against energy depletion attack in RPL-based LLNs.