Resolving the Decreased Rank Attack in RPL’s IoT Networks

Ghaleb, B.; Al-Dubai, A.; Hussain, A.; Ahmad, J.; Romdhani, I.; Jaroucheh, Z.

Abstract

The Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy networks (RPL) has been developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standardization body to serve as a part of the 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks) standard, a core communication technology for the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. RPL organizes its network in the form of a tree-like structure where a node is configured as the root of the tree while others integrate themselves into that structure based on their relative distance from the root. A value called the Rank is used in RPL's networks to define each node's relative position and it is used by other nodes to take their routing decisions. A malicious node can illegitimately claim a closer position to the root by advertising a lower rank value trapping other nodes to forward their traffic through that malicious node. In this study, we show how this behavior can have a detrimental side effect on the network via extensive simulations and propose a new secure objective function to prevent such an attack.

Citation

Ghaleb, B., Al-Dubai, A., Hussain, A., Ahmad, J., Romdhani, I., & Jaroucheh, Z. (2023, June). Resolving the Decreased Rank Attack in RPL’s IoT Networks. Presented at 19th Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT 2023), Pafos, Cyprus

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 19th Annual International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT 2023)
• Start Date: Jun 19, 2023
• End Date: Jun 21, 2023
• Acceptance Date: Apr 7, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Sep 27, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023
• Deposit Date: Apr 28, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 27, 2023
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Pages: 65-68
• Book Title: 2023 19th International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT)
• ISBN: 979-8-3503-4650-3
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/DCOSS-IoT58021.2023.00018
• Keywords: Internet of Things (IoT), IoT Security, RPL Standard, Decreased Rank Attack
• Publisher URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/1800455/all-proceedings