A potential flooding version number attack against RPL based IOT networks

Mehdi Rouissat – Mohammed Belkheir – Hichem Sid Ahmed Belkhira

   Routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) has been proposed for power, memory, and processing constrained devices. Owing to their constrained, RPL-based networks are exposed to a wide range of security attacks that mainly include control message tampering. In this paper we propose and study a modified version number attack, based on flooding the network by falsified incremented version numbers. The obtained results show that the modified attack led to an immense increase in the overhead, 1426 %, compared with the attack-free case, and an increase of 182 % in the total energy consumption. When it comes to PDR a degradation to 4.7 % has been recorded, affecting the reliability of the network. On the other hand, the latency also showed an increase from 0.24 s in the attack-free case to 0.89 s, which is mainly due to the high congestion created by the attack.

Keywords: RPL, security, version number, flooding, Cooja

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