The DAO Induction Attack: Analysis and Countermeasure

We study the destination advertisement object (DAO) induction attack, a new attack against Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL), the standard routing protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT). In the DAO induction attack, a compromised node in the network periodically transmits a special control message. Each of these crafted control messages induces many nodes in the network to transmit in response. We show that transmitting these unnecessary messages can significantly increase the power consumption of nodes, hence reduce the lifetime of battery-operated IoT devices. In addition, we show that the attack severely impacts end-to-end latency and packet delivery ratio, two important network performance metrics. For instance, in a network with 50 nodes, our simulation results show that the attack increases the average end-to-end latency and packet loss ratio by 410% and 260%, respectively. To counter the attack, we propose a lightweight solution. We show that our solution imposes no overhead when the network is in its normal operation (i.e., it is not under attack) and can quickly detect the attack even when the network experiences high packet loss rates.