Physical Identification Based Trust Path Routing Against Sybil Attacks on RPL in IoT Networks

Routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) is a popular protocol used in IPv6 based wireless Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Wireless IoT devices using RPL without centralized security management are extremely vulnerable to Sybil attacks, as a malicious node can forge multiple identities and easily conduct denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Several countermeasures have been investigated to prevent DoS caused by Sybil attacks in RPL, but crucial limitations still remain. In this letter, a physical identification based trust path routing (PITrust) scheme that uses the received signal strength indicator (RSSI) and a centralized trust scheme to improve Sybil node detection is proposed, which is shown to improve the detection rate and packet delivery ratio when compared to other schemes.