A Root-based Defense Mechanism Against RPL Blackhole Attacks in Internet of Things Networks

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), various smart “things”, such as home appliances, vehicles and mobile medical devices, connected through the Internet are increasingly adopted by consumers. Many of such connections are enabled by IoT routing protocol: IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL), which utilizes a variety of objective functions (OFs) and routing constraints to establish an optimal routing path for each network node. However, recent studies show that topology attacks, such as Blackhole attacks, have brought great security challenges to the secure routing in IoT networks. On the other hand, as most of the IoT edge devices are resource constrainted, they cannot afford intensive computations and communications required by conventional security solutions. Therefore, in this work, we propose a lightweight defense mechanism based on RPL routing protocol to detect Blackhole attacks and exclude the detected malicious nodes from the routing network. The results show that the proposed mechanism can effectively detect and defend against Blackhole attacks while causing limited energy consumption overhead.