Enhancing Routing Security in IoT: Performance Evaluation of RPL’s Secure Mode Under Attacks

As the routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL)s became the standard for routing in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) networks, many researchers had investigated the security aspects of this protocol. However, no work (to the best of our knowledge) has investigated the use of the security mechanisms included in RPL's standard, mainly because there was no implementation for these features in any Internet of Things (IoT) operating systems yet. A partial implementation of RPL's security mechanisms was presented recently for the Contiki operating system (by Perazzo et al.), which provided us with an opportunity to examine RPL's security mechanisms. In this article, we investigate the effects and challenges of using RPL's security mechanisms under common routing attacks. First, a comparison of RPL's performance, with and without its security mechanisms, under four routing attacks [Blackhole, Selective-Forward (SF), Neighbor, and Wormhole (WH) attacks] is conducted using several metrics (e.g., average data packet delivery rate, average data packet latency, average power consumption, etc.). This comparison is performed using two commonly used radio duty-cycle protocols. Second, and based on the observations from this comparison, we propose two techniques that could reduce the effects of such attacks, without having added security mechanisms for RPL. An evaluation of these techniques shows improved performance of RPL under the investigated attacks, except for the WH.