Study of the Impact of Sinkhole Attack in IoT Using Shewhart Control Charts

IPv6 over low power wireless personal area network (6LoWPAN) is used in wireless sensor network as it has ability to transmit IPv6 packet with low bandwidth and limited resources. Routing protocol for low power and lossy network (RPL) is routing protocol which is used by 6LoWPAN network. RPL can be exposed to various routing attacks that can damage the network. The sinkhole attack is one of the most destructive routing attacks in IoT environment. A sinkhole attacker attract the greatest amount of traffic by announcing the fake path towards the sink node. In RPL a routing topology is created to form a Destination-Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG). The topology is created and maintained via control packets called DODAG Information Objects (DIO), advertised by each node. Increased number of DIO messages determine that the network routing topology is instable and their decreasing frequency mean that the network is stable. In this paper we study the impact of the sinkhole attack by analyzing network traffic to calculate number of DIO messages sent by each node. The method is based on a Shewhart control chart to determine the Upper Control Limit (UCL) of delivered number of DIO messages in normal situation. In the Shewhart control chart the compromises nodes can be visibly detected.