ML-based Detection of Rank and Blackhole Attacks in RPL Networks

Although IoT security is a field studied extensively, recent attacks such as BotenaGo show that current security solutions cannot effectively stop the spread of IoT attacks. Machine Learning (ML) techniques are promising in improving protection against such attacks. In this work, three supervised ML algorithms are trained and evaluated for detecting rank and blackhole attacks in RPL-based IoT networks. Extensive simulations of the attacks are implemented to create a dataset and appropriate fields are identified for training the ML model. We use Google AutoML and Microsoft Azure ML platforms to train our model. Our evaluation results show that ML techniques can be effective in detecting rank and blackhole attacks, achieving a precision of 93.3%.