Addressing Flooding Attacks in IPv6-based Low Power and Lossy Networks

In the RPL routing protocol, DODAG Information Solicitation (DIS) control messages are sent by nodes to join the network. In turn, the receiver node replies with DODAG Information Object (DIO) control message after resetting its trickle timer. A malicious node can utilize this RPL protocol behavior to perform the DIS flooding attack by sending illegitimate DIS frequently which forces normal nodes to reset their trickle timers and flood the network with DIO messages. In this study, we show that such attacks can severely degrade the performance of Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) because of the increase in control packet overhead and power consumption. To address DIS flooding attacks, we propose a lightweight mitigation scheme that detects and mitigate such attacks in order to improve LLNs performance.