Enhancing Routing Security in IoT: Performance Evaluation of RPL Secure Mode under Attacks
Ahmed Raoof, Ashraf Matrawy, Chung-Horng Lung
备注：
10 pages, 29 figures. This paper was submitted to the IEEE Internet of Things Journal on Apr 2020 for review, and it is an extended version of (arXiv:1905.10314) which was published in Globecom 2019 conference. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1905.10314
As the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) became the standard for routing in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks, many researchers had investigated the security aspects of this protocol. However, no work (to the best of our knowledge) has investigated the use of the security mechanisms included in RPL standard, mainly because there was no implementation for these features in any IoT operating systems yet. A partial implementation of RPL security mechanisms was presented recently for the Contiki operating system (by Perazzo et al.), which provided us with an opportunity to examine RPL security mechanisms. In this paper, we investigate the effects and challenges of using RPL security mechanisms under common routing attacks. First, a comparison of RPL performance, with and without its security mechanisms, under four routing attacks (Blackhole, Selective-Forward, Neighbor, and Wormhole attacks) is conducted using several metrics (e.g., average data packet delivery rate, average data packet delay, average power consumption, etc.). This comparison is performed using two commonly used Radio Duty-Cycle protocols. Secondly, and based on the observations from this comparison, we propose two techniques that could reduce the effects of such attacks, without having added security mechanisms for RPL. An evaluation of these techniques shows improved performance of RPL under the investigated attacks, except for the Wormhole attack.
The next generation of electric grid has a scalable and reliable bi-directional communication infrastructure known as Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) to allow monitoring and controlling of grid resources. In this kind of communication system, comprising thousands of resource-constrained nodes such as smart meters, the routing protocol plays a critical role to guarantee reliability and low latency for data delivery. The Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) currently is standardized by IETF which is expected to meet the requirements of AMI networks as the standard routi…
A recent paper by Yang et al. [1] proposed CRB-RPL as a new RPL-based routing protocol for communications in cognitive radio (CR) enabled smart grid. Essentially, CRB-RPL adopts the operation of CRB-MAC, which is a medium access control (MAC) protocol for cognitive machine-to-machine (M2M) communications, and depicts it as a network layer enhancement. CRB-RPL suffers from a number of technical flaws in terms of protocol operation and analytical aspects. The main objective of this paper is to highlight these technical flaws of CRB-RPL and provide corrections to analytical modeling.
In many application areas such as large-scale disaster detection, IoT networks connote the characteristics of LLN (Low power and Lossy Network). With few exceptions, prior work on RPL(Routing Protocol for LLN), a standard routing protocol standardized in the IETF, has focused on the evaluation of various aspects of routing performances and control overheads. In this paper, we address the problem of DODAG (Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph) created by the direct application of RPL. We first evaluate the skewness of DODAG both via numerical simulations and via actual large-scale testbe…
After a decade of research in low-power data collection, reaching arbitrary nodes has received comparatively little attention. The leading protocol for low-power IPv6 routing, RPL, is no exception, as it is often studied in multipoint-to-point scenarios. As a result, downward routing (from root to node) is still notoriously difficult, holding back the emergence of Internet of Things applications that involve actuation. In this paper, we focus on achieving industrial-grade reliability levels (1e-5 failure rate) in downward routing with RPL. We make every packet count, and classify the different…
IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is an essential routing protocol to enable communications for IoT networks with low power devices. RPL uses an objective function and routing constraints to find an optimized routing path for each node in the network. However, recent research has shown that topological attacks, such as selective forwarding attacks, pose great challenges to the secure routing of IoT networks. Many conventional secure routing solutions, on the other hand, are computationally heavy to be directly applied in resource-constrained IoT networks. There is an…
RPL, the routing protocol proposed by IETF for IPv6/6LoWPAN Low Power and Lossy Networks has significant complexity. Another protocol called LOADng, a lightweight variant of AODV, emerges as an alternative solution. In this paper, we compare the performance of the two protocols in a Home Automation scenario with heterogenous traffic patterns including a mix of multipoint-to-point and point-to-multipoint routes in realistic dense non-uniform network topologies. We use Contiki OS and Cooja simulator to evaluate the behavior of the ContikiRPL implementation and a basic non-optimized implementatio…
As the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) became the standard for routing in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks, many researchers had investigated the security aspects of this protocol. However, no work (to the best of our knowledge) has investigated the use of the security mechanisms included in the protocol standard, due to the fact that there was no implementation for these features in any IoT operating system yet. A partial implementation of RPL security mechanisms was presented recently for Contiki operating system (by Perazzo et al.), which provided us with the op…
RPL, an IPv6 routing protocol for Low power Lossy Networks (LLNs), is considered to be the de facto routing standard for the Internet of Things (IoT). However, more and more experimental results demonstrate that RPL performs poorly when it comes to throughput and adaptability to network dynamics. This significantly limits the application of RPL in many practical IoT scenarios, such as an LLN with high-speed sensor data streams and mobile sensing devices. To address this issue, we develop BRPL, an extension of RPL, providing a practical approach that allows users to smoothly combine any RPL Obj…
The growth and evolution of Internet of Things (IoT) is now of paramount importance for next-generation networks, including the upcoming 6G. In particular, there is a set of constrained IoT nodes that comprise the Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs), which have very particular requirements. The current standard for routing in those networks is RPL, which was defined less than a decade ago and still needs improvements in terms of scalability or integration with other networks. Many researchers currently need an implementation of RPL to evaluate their works and, for that reason, among others, we…
With the introduction of the smart grid, Advanced Metering Infrastructure (AMI) has become a main component in the present power system. The effective implementation of AMI depends widely on its communication infrastructure and protocols providing trustworthy two-way communications. In this paper we study two routing protocols philosophies for low power and lossy networks (LLNs) and their application for a smart metering scenario. This study purposes a detailed evaluation of two routing protocols proposed by IETF the proactive candidate namely RPL (IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy…
The innovative services empowered by the Internet of Things (IoT) require a seamless and reliable wireless infrastructure that enables communications within heterogeneous and dynamic low-power and lossy networks (LLNs). The Routing Protocol for LLNs (RPL) was designed to meet the communication requirements of a wide range of IoT application domains. However, a load balancing problem exists in RPL under heavy traffic-load scenarios, degrading the network performance in terms of delay and packet delivery. In this paper, we tackle the problem of load-balancing in RPL networks using a reinforcemen…
RPL is the emerging routing standard for low power and lossy networks (LLNs). LLN is a key component of the Internet of Things (IoT), hence its security is imperative for the age of IoT. In this work, we present the DAO induction attack, a novel attack against RPL. In this attack, a malicious insider or a compromised node periodically increments its DTSN number. Each such increment can trigger/induce a large number of control message transmissions in the network. We show that this degrades the network performance in terms of end-to-end latency, packet loss ratio, and power consumption. To miti…
The IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) is the standard routing protocol for IPv6 based low-power wireless personal area networks (6LoWPANs). In RPL protocol, DODAG information object (DIO) messages are used to disseminate routing information to other nodes in the network. A malicious node may eavesdrop DIO messages of its neighbor nodes and later replay the captured DIO many times with fixed intervals. In this paper, we present and investigate one of the severe attacks named as a non-spoofed copycat attack, a type of replay based DoS attack against RPL protocol. It is…
The Internet of Things, also known as the IoT, refers to the billions of devices around the world that are now connected to the Internet, collecting and sharing data. The amount of data collected through IoT sensors must be completely securely controlled. To protect the information collected by IoT sensors, a lightweight method called Discover the Flooding Attack-RPL (DFA-RPL) has been proposed. The proposed DFA-RPL method identifies intrusive nodes in several steps to exclude them from continuing routing operations. Thus, in the DFA-RPL method, it first builds a cluster and selects the most a…
Driven by the special requirements of the Lowpower and Lossy Networks (LLNs), the IPv6 Routing Protocol for LLNs (RPL) was standardized by the IETF some six years ago to tackle the routing issue in such networks. Since its introduction, however, numerous studies have pointed out that, in its current form, RPL suffers from issues that limit its efficiency and domain of applicability. Thus, several solutions have been proposed in the literature in an attempt to overcome these identified limitations. In this survey, we aim mainly to provide a comprehensive review of these research proposals asses…
Internet of Things (IoT) is one of the fastest emerging networking paradigms enabling a large number of applications for the benefit of mankind. Advancements in embedded system technology and compressed IPv6 have enabled the support of IP stack in resource constrained heterogeneous smart devices. However, global connectivity and resource constrained characteristics of smart devices have exposed them to different insider and outsider attacks, which put users' security and privacy at risk. Various risks associated with IoT slow down its growth and become an obstruction in the worldwide adoption …
As the de facto routing protocol for many Internet of Things (IoT) networks nowadays, and to assure the confidentiality and integrity of its control messages, the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) incorporates three modes of security: the Unsecured Mode (UM), Preinstalled Secure Mode (PSM), and the Authenticated Secure Mode (ASM). While the PSM and ASM are intended to protect against external routing attacks and some replay attacks (through an optional replay protection mechanism), recent research showed that RPL in PSM is still vulnerable to many routing attacks, both in…
In this paper, we study the downward routing for network control/actuation in large-scale and heterogeneous wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and Internet of Things (IoT). We propose the Opportunistic Source Routing (OSR), a scalable and reliable downward routing protocol for WSNs/IoT. OSR introduces opportunistic routing into traditional source routing based on the parent set of a node's upward routing in data collection, significantly addressing the drastic link dynamics in low-power and lossy WSNs. We devise a novel adaptive Bloom filter mechanism to effectively and efficiently encode a downw…
In recent times researchers have found several security vulnerabilities in the Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy network (RPL), amongst which rank attack is a predominant one causing detrimental effects on the network by creating a fake topology. To address this concern, we propose a low-overhead rank attack detection scheme for non-storing mode of RPL used in IoT to deal with both increased and decreased rank attacks. Accordingly, we have modified the RPL Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) formation algorithm to detect rank attacks during topology formation and mainten…
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The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) was recently introduced as the new routing standard for the Internet of Things. Although RPL defines basic security modes, it remains vulnerable to topological attacks which facilitate blackholing, interception, and resource exhaustion. We are concerned with analyzing the corresponding threats and protecting future RPL deployments from such attacks. Our contributions are twofold. First, we analyze the state of the art, in particular the protective scheme VeRA and present two new rank order attacks as well as extensions to mitigat…
Over the last few years, standardisation efforts are consolidating the role of the Routing Protocol for LowPower and Lossy Networks (RPL) as the standard routing protocol for IPv6 based Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). Although many core functionalities are well defined, others are left implementation dependent. Among them, the definition of an efficient link quality estimation (LQE) strategy is of paramount importance, as it influences significantly both the quality of the selected network routes and nodes' energy consumption. In this paper, we present RLProbe, a novel strategy for link quali…
The current standard of Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) incorporates three modes of security: the Unsecured Mode (UM), Preinstalled Secure Mode (PSM), and the Authenticated Secure Mode (ASM). While the PSM and ASM are intended to protect against external routing attacks and some replay attacks (through an optional replay protection mechanism), recent research showed that RPL in PSM is still vulnerable to many routing attacks, both internal and external. In this paper, we propose a novel secure mode for RPL, the Chained Secure Mode (CSM), based on the concept of intraflo…
IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is the standard network layer protocol for achieving efficient routing in IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). Resource-constrained and non-tamper resistant nature of smart sensor nodes makes RPL protocol susceptible to different threats. An attacker may use insider or outsider attack strategy to perform Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks against RPL based networks. Security and Privacy risks associated with RPL protocol may limit its global adoption and worldwide acceptance. A proper investigation of RPL speci…
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