A Novel Countermeasure for Selective Forwarding Attacks in IoT Networks

As the Internet of Things (IoT) devices become more widespread there are rising public concerns about whether or not IoT devices and their services are secure. One of the major threats they face is selective forwarding attacks performed by malicious nodes. Although packets can be lost inherently due to network conditions, malicious nodes, such as those performing blackhole attacks, may deliberately drop some, but not all of them. Therefore, distinguishing these nodes from legitimate ones is not so easy. This study has proposed a lightweight countermeasure to deal with this kind of attack in IoT networks, using the standard IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). The mechanism is based on Mobile Trusted Nodes (MTNs). For the given threat model, we showed that our model has robust detection accuracy and brings no additional overhead to the network.