A Novel Detection and Localization Scheme of Wormhole Attack in IoT Network

With the explosive growth of Internet of Things (IoT) devices, IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) has been widely adopted. However, due to lack of complete security mechanisms, it faces many threats, one of which is wormhole attack. Wormhole attack could mislead traffic, cause network congestion and increase packet delivery latency. Besides, it can also be combined with other attacks to become more threatening. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme, called RLDW, to detect wormhole nodes in RPL-based networks. Our method could not only detect but also localize the adversaries without any additional hardware cost. We implement the scheme in the Contiki IoT operating system and compare with a state-of-the-art scheme. The results obtained from Contiki demonstrate the feasibility of our proposal concerning detection speed, accuracy and network performance improvement.