Implementing and evaluating a new Silent Rank Attack in RPL-Contiki based IoT networks

Mehdi Rouissat – Mohammed Belkheir – Hichem S. A. Belkhira – Allel Mokaddem – Djamila Ziani

   IoT networks are witnessing a rapid growth in various domains of our daily life, offering more attractive features in terms of measurement accuracy, easy implementation and affordable deployment costs. This outstanding boom is not undoubtedly far away from different challenging issues that impede the network efficiency and quality. The security concern remains one among the prominent issues that affect both the edge and the core IoT network where risks increase in conjunction with the network expansion. RPL is the well-known routing protocol for the edge part of the IoT network, intended to meet the requirements of the constrained IoT devices. Despite its various advantages, RPL remains suffering from various security attacks targeting the topology, the traffic, and the nodes resources. Our work presents a new silent decreased rank attack against RPL-Contiki, as well as a lightweight countermeasure. The obtained results on a random studied topology show that almost half the existing nodes in the topology were attracted by the planted malicious node, through its falsified low rank. Moreover, an increase of 12.5% in the control overhead and an increase of 15% in the total consumed energy are recorded compared to the attack-free topology. On the other hand, the attack did not heavily affect the PDR, but the latency showed an increase of 45% compared to the attack free case. This damaging effect makes this modified rank attack a serious threat to IoT RPL based networks.

Keywords: IoT, RPL, Contiki, security, rank

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