Security Vulnerabilities and Countermeasures in the RPL-Based Internet of Things

RPL is a routing protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks, which is the routing protocol standardized for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, RPL has many serious vulnerabilities which can be exploited by attackers. In this paper, we adopt an finite state machines(FSM) based vulnerability discovering approach to analyze the security vulnerabilities of RPL, which can successfully discover sinkhole attack, selective-forwarding attack and hello flood attack. Then we propose some security countermeasures to defend against the attacks. Finally, we run a thorough set of simulations to assess the impact of the sinkhole attack and the effectiveness of proposed countermeasure. The results show that the attack can significantly damage the RPL and the countermeasure can successfully detect the malicious node.

I. Introduction

The Internet-of-Things (IoT)silently changes the way people communicate with the physical world by a possibly large number of intelligent devices. It is expected to be widely used in smart city, home automation, health monitoring and industrial applications [1]–[2]. In this technological revolution, standardization plays a very important role. Numerous groups are currently working on the protocols at different levels of the stack of IoT. The IEEE and IETF working group are collaborating to make a standard protocol stack for IoT [3]–[4]. The goal is that the resource-constrained wireless sensors in IoT can be connect into the Internet. So anyone can visit or communicate with them in anytime by website.