Enhancing RPL resilience against routing layer insider attacks

Abstract

To gather and transmit data, low cost wireless devices are often deployed in open, unattended and possibly hostile environment, making them particularly vulnerable to physical attacks. Resilience is needed to mitigate such inherent vulnerabilities and risks related to security and reliability. In this paper, Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is studied in presence of packet dropping malicious compromised nodes. Random behavior and data replication have been introduced to RPL to enhance its resilience against such insider attacks. The classical RPL and its resilient variants have been analyzed through Cooja simulations and hardware emulation. Resilient techniques introduced to RPL have enhanced significantly the resilience against attacks providing route diversification to exploit the redundant topology created by wireless communications. In particular, the proposed resilient RPL exhibits better performance in terms of delivery ratio (up to 40%), fairness and connectivity while staying energy efficient.