Addressing DIO Suppression Attack in RPL based IoT Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) has brought a revolution in technology in the last decade. IoT is susceptible to numerous internal routing attacks because of the characteristics of the sensors used in IoT networks and the insecure nature of the Internet. The majority of the IoT ecosystem’s problems come during the routing phase. While routing, the attacking node causes a number of challenges with the packet transmission mechanism. Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is susceptible to numerous types of attacks. The effects could be disruptive to network performance and resource availability. In this paper, we investigate the impact of a novel attack known as the DIO suppression attack and propose a mitigation mechanism for this attack on RPL-based network. This attack disrupts the topology of a network, and as a result, certain number of nodes are disconnected. Attacker nodes exploit the trickle algorithm to execute this attack. The impact of DIO suppression attack in different topologies and scenarios is studied in this research. We have also proposed a lightweight mitigation technique to defend the networks from this attack. This technique leverages the trickling timer’s DIO Redundancy Constant k for each node to identify the attacking node in the network.