Impact Analysis of RPL Attacks on 6Lo WPAN based Internet of Things network

IPv6 low-power personal area network (6LoWP AN) is a widely used communication protocol for the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. The Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) proposed by the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF) is the prevailing protocol for routing in 6Lo WP AN networks. RFC 6550 of IETF put forth the unsecured behavior of the RPL protocol. Providing security to RPL network devices is a very challenging task because the devices connected to RPL /IPv6 are resource-constrained, having less memory, less processing power, limited battery life, and low bandwidth. This paper put forth that to secure the IoT network it is essential to understand the behavior of attacks. The paper also attempted to analyze the behaviors and impact of RPL attacks. Further, the paper implements increased rank RPL attacks and decreased rank RPL attack using IoT -specific Contiki operating system. The Cooja simulator is used to demonstrate the impact of the attacks on the IoT network. Furthermore, this paper describes the security model for the prevention of RPL attacks.