Hatchetman Attack: A Denial of Service Attack Against Routing in Low Power and Lossy Networks

Low power and lossy networks (LLNs) are rapidly burgeoning as an important part of ubiquitous communication infrastructure, and serving as a major building block for emerging Internet-of-Things (IoT) applications. A novel routing protocol for low power and lossy networks, referred to as RPL, has been standardized to provide efficient and reliable communication in LLNs, and enable the integration of resources-constrained devices into the Internet. However, due to the lack of resources, physical protection, and security requirements of inherent routing protocol, RPL-based LLNs are admittedly vulnerable to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks that primarily disrupt network protocols and interfere with on-going communications. In this paper, we investigate a new type of DoS attack, called hatchetman attack, in promptly emerging RPL-based LLNs. In hatchetman attack, the malicious node manipulates the source route header of the received packets, and then generates and sends a large number of invalid packets with error route to legitimate nodes, which cause the legitimate nodes to drop the received packets and reply an excessive number of Error messages back to the DODAG root. As a result, a great number of packets are dropped by legitimate nodes and excessive Error messages exhaust the communication bandwidth and node energy, which lead to a denial of service in RPL-based LLNs. We conduct extensive simulation experiments for performance evaluation of hatchetman attack and comparison with jamming attack and original RPL without adversary. The simulation results indicate that the hatchetman attack is an extremely severe attack in RPL-based LLNs.