A Secure Routing Protocol Based on RPL for Internet of Things

TLDR: The concept of rank threshold along with hash chain authentication technique to deal with internal attacks like sinkhole, black hole, selective forwarding attacks etc is introduced.

Abstract: Data transportation and routing in Internet of Things (IoT) is a challenging issue where massive data collection and gathering are predictable. The Routing Protocol for Low- power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is one of the best candidates to ensure routing in 6LoWPAN networks. However, RPL is vulnerable to a number of attacks related to exchanged control messages. In this paper, we propose a new secure routing protocol based on RPL referred to as Secure-RPL (SRPL). The main aim of SRPL is to prevent misbehaving nodes from maliciously changing control message values such as the rank of a node that may disturb a network by creating a fake topology. We introduce the concept of rank threshold along with hash chain authentication technique to deal with internal attacks like sinkhole, black hole, selective forwarding attacks etc. Simulation results show that SRPL is robust and resistant to this kind of attacks based on malicious manipulation of RPL metrics.