Towards Mitigating Blackhole Attack in NDN-Enabled IoT

Named Data Networking (NDN) has evolved as a networking model to facilitate the distribution, security, and mobility of content in the Internet of Things (IoT). NDN provides several advantages to IoT by overcoming the constraints of the TCP/IP model through its unique features of named content, in-network caching, and a named-based routing approach. Due to the computational power and strict energy restrictions, IoT endpoints often switch to sleep mode to save energy, which results in being in stealth mode or dead address that causes missed or silently dropped packets. Moreover, a malicious node may intentionally drop packets exploiting this constraint, referred to as a blackhole attack. In this paper, we present a reputation-based forwarding approach with a reactive reputation updating mechanism to mitigate blackhole attacks in the NDN-enabled IoT network. We analyze assumptions underlying our algorithm requirements and show its effectiveness using a complex IoT network simulated in NetworkX.