Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

A novel decentralized security architecture against sybil attack in RPL-based IoT networks: a focus on smart home use case

  • Published:
The Journal of Supercomputing Aims and scope Submit manuscript

Abstract

Internet of things (IoT) is renowned for being a massive revolution led by business leaders and researchers. Routing protocol for low-power and lossy network (RPL) is a standardized protocol that serves the routing need of the IPv6-based low-power and lossy networks, which are the significant enablers of the IoT technology. Despite its many outstanding features, RPL offers very low protection against different routing attacks. In this respect, we mainly emphasize on the sybil attack. Specifically, we focus on three different types of sybil attack on a realistic smart home network topology. Considering the involvement of resource-constraint devices, we propose and evaluate a novel decentralized countermeasure against these attacks. The proposed countermeasure is based on a hybrid approach that involves the use of the geographical location of the nodes and a trust value-based parent selection procedure. Along with this, we use specially configured monitoring nodes that are responsible for the detection of the malicious attacker node(s). Further, we use RPL’s multi-instance property to integrate the proposed decentralized architecture into the exiting RPL protocol. We implement the proposed countermeasure in Cooja, the Contiki operating system-based network simulator. The results obtained through our experiments validate the practicality of the proposed countermeasure.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Log in via an institution

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 3
Fig. 4
Fig. 5
Fig. 6
Fig. 7
Fig. 8
Fig. 9
Fig. 10
Fig. 11
Fig. 12
Fig. 13
Fig. 14
Fig. 15
Fig. 16
Fig. 17
Fig. 18
Fig. 19
Fig. 20

Similar content being viewed by others

References

  1. Watteyne T, Molinaro A, Richichi MG, Dohler M (2010) From MANET to IETF roll standardization: a paradigm shift in WSN routing protocols. IEEE Commun Surv Tutor 13(4):688–707

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Bang AO, Ramteke PL (2013) MANET: history, challenges and applications. Int J Appl Innov Eng Manag (IJAIEM) 2(9):249–251

    Google Scholar 

  3. Airehrour D, Gutierrez J, Ray SK (2016) Secure routing for internet of things: a survey. J Netw Comput Appl 66:198–213

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. “Internet of things (IoT)—the future of IoT miniguide: the burgeoning IoT market continues, 2019. [Online]. https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/solutions/internet-of-things/future-of-iot.html

  5. Shirer M, MacGillivray C (2019) The growth in connected IoT devices is expected to generate 79.4 ZB of data in 2025, according to a new IDC forecast

  6. Raoof A, Matrawy A, Lung C-H (2018) Routing attacks and mitigation methods for RPL-based internet of things. IEEE Commun Surv Tutor 21(2):1582–1606

    Article  Google Scholar 

  7. Hwang YH (2015) IoT security & privacy: threats and challenges, In: Proceedings of the 1st ACM workshop on IoT privacy, trust, and security, p 1

  8. Patra L, Rao UP (2016) Internet of things—architecture, applications, security and other major challenges. In: 2016 3rd International Conference on Computing for Sustainable Global Development (INDIACom). IEEE, pp 1201–1206

  9. Winter T, Thubert P, Brandt A, Hui JW, Kelsey R, Levis P, Pister K, Struik R, Vasseur J-P, Alexander RK (2012) RPL: IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks

  10. Kharrufa H, Al-Kashoash HA, Kemp AH (2019) RPL-based routing protocols in IoT applications: a review. IEEE Sens J 19(15):5952–5967

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Ghaleb B, Al-Dubai A, Ekonomou E, Qasem M, Romdhani I, Mackenzie L (2018) Addressing the DAO insider attack in RPL’s internet of things networks. IEEE Commun Lett 23(1):68–71

    Article  Google Scholar 

  12. Tahir Y, Yang S, McCann J (2017) BRPL: backpressure RPL for high-throughput and mobile IoTs. IEEE Trans Mobile Comput 17(1):29–43

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Pongle P, Chavan G (2015) A survey: attacks on RPL and 6LoWPAN in IoT. In: International Conference on Pervasive Computing (ICPC). IEEE 2015, pp 1–6

  14. Le A, Loo J, Luo Y, Lasebae A (2013) The impacts of internal threats towards routing protocol for low power and lossy network performance. In: 2013 IEEE Symposium on Computers and Communications (ISCC). IEEE, pp 000789–000794

  15. Zhang K, Liang X, Lu R, Shen X (2014) Sybil attacks and their defenses in the internet of things. IEEE Internet Things J 1(5):372–383

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Hui TK, Sherratt RS, Sánchez DD (2017) Major requirements for building smart homes in smart cities based on internet of things technologies. Future Gener Comput Syst 76:358–369

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Machado K, Rosário D, Cerqueira E, Loureiro AA, Neto A, De Souza JN (2013) A routing protocol based on energy and link quality for internet of things applications. Sensors 13(2):1942–1964

    Article  Google Scholar 

  18. Giusto D, Iera A, Morabito G, Atzori L (2010) The internet of things: 20th Tyrrhenian workshop on digital communications. Springer, Berlin

    Book  Google Scholar 

  19. Airehrour D, Gutierrez JA, Ray SK (2019) Sectrust-RPL: a secure trust-aware RPL routing protocol for internet of things. Future Gener Comput Syst 93:860–876

    Article  Google Scholar 

  20. Kaliyar P, Jaballah WB, Conti M, Lal C (2020) LiDL: localization with early detection of sybil and wormhole attacks in IoT networks. Comput Secur. 94:101849

    Article  Google Scholar 

  21. Levis P, Clausen T, Hui J, Gnawali O, Ko J (2011) The trickle algorithm, Internet Engineering Task Force, RFC6206

  22. Kim H-S, Ko J, Culler DE, Paek J (2017) Challenging the IPV6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL): a survey. IEEE Commun Surv Tutor 19(4):2502–2525

    Article  Google Scholar 

  23. Evangelista D, Mezghani F, Nogueira M, Santos A (2016) Evaluation of sybil attack detection approaches in the internet of things content dissemination. In: Wireless days (WD). IEEE 2016, pp 1–6

  24. Jan MA, Nanda P, He X, Liu RP (2018) A sybil attack detection scheme for a forest wildfire monitoring application. Future Gener Comput Syst 80:613–626

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Yao Y, Xiao B, Yang G, Hu Y, Wang L, Zhou X (2019) Power control identification: a novel sybil attack detection scheme in VANETs using RSSI. IEEE J Sel Areas Commun 37(11):2588–2602

    Article  Google Scholar 

  26. Al-Qurishi M, Alrubaian M, Rahman SMM, Alamri A, Hassan MM (2018) A prediction system of sybil attack in social network using deep-regression model. Future Gener Comput Syst 87:743–753

    Article  Google Scholar 

  27. Ayaida M, Messai N, Najeh S, Ndjore KB (2019) A macroscopic traffic model-based approach for sybil attack detection in VANETs. Ad Hoc Netw 90:101845

    Article  Google Scholar 

  28. Vasudeva A, Sood M (2018) Survey on sybil attack defense mechanisms in wireless ad hoc networks. J Netw Comput Appl 120:78–118

    Article  Google Scholar 

  29. Lu Y, Da Xu L (2018) Internet of things (IoT) cybersecurity research: a review of current research topics. IEEE Internet Things J 6(2):2103–2115

    Article  Google Scholar 

  30. Raza S, Wallgren L, Voigt T (2013) SVELTE: real-time intrusion detection in the internet of things. Ad hoc Netw 11(8):2661–2674

    Article  Google Scholar 

  31. Medjek F, Tandjaoui D, Abdmeziem MR, Djedjig N (2015) Analytical evaluation of the impacts of sybil attacks against RPL under mobility. In: 12th international symposium on programming and systems (ISPS). IEEE 2015, pp 1–9

  32. Medjek F, Tandjaoui D, Romdhani I, Djedjig N (2017) Performance evaluation of RPL protocol under mobile sybil attacks. IEEE Trustcom/BigDataSE/ICESS. IEEE 2017:1049–1055

    Article  Google Scholar 

  33. Medjek F, Tandjaoui D, Romdhani I, Djedjig N (2017) A trust-based intrusion detection system for mobile RPL based networks, In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Internet of Things (iThings) and IEEE Green Computing and Communications (GreenCom) and IEEE Cyber, Physical and Social Computing (CPSCom) and IEEE Smart Data (SmartData). IEEE, pp 735–742

  34. Nikam A, Ambawade D (2018) Opinion metric based intrusion detection mechanism for RPL protocol in IoT. In: 3rd International Conference for Convergence in Technology (I2CT). IEEE 2018, pp 1–6

  35. Conti M, Kaliyar P, Rabbani MM, Ranise S (2018) SPLIT: a secure and scalable RPL routing protocol for internet of things. In: 2018 14th International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Computing, Networking and Communications (WiMob). IEEE, pp 1–8

  36. Thulasiraman P, Wang Y (2019) A lightweight trust-based security architecture for RPL in mobile IoT networks. In: 16th IEEE Annual Consumer Communications & Networking Conference (CCNC). IEEE 2019, pp 1–6

  37. Hashemi SY, Aliee FS (2019) Dynamic and comprehensive trust model for IoT and its integration into RPL. J Supercomput 75(7):3555–3584

    Article  Google Scholar 

  38. Tandon A, Srivastava P (2019) Trust-based enhanced secure routing against rank and sybil attacks in IoT. In: 2019 Twelfth International Conference on Contemporary Computing (IC3). IEEE, pp 1–7

  39. Murali S, Jamalipour A (2019) A lightweight intrusion detection for sybil attack under mobile RPL in the internet of things. IEEE Internet Things J 7(1):379–388

    Article  Google Scholar 

  40. Pu C (2020) Sybil attack in RPL-based internet of things: analysis and defenses. IEEE Internet Things J 7(6):4937–4949

    Article  Google Scholar 

  41. Gnawali O, Levis P (2012) The minimum rank with hysteresis objective function, RFC 6719

  42. Preiss T, Sherburne M, Marchany R, Tront J (2014) Implementing dynamic address changes in contikios. In: International Conference on Information Society (i-Society 2014). IEEE, pp 222–227

  43. Dunkels A, Gronvall B, Voigt T (2004) Contiki-a lightweight and flexible operating system for tiny networked sensors, In: 29th annual IEEE International Conference on Local Computer Networks. IEEE, pp 455–462

  44. Österlind F, Dunkels A, Eriksson J, Finne N, Voigt T (2006) Cross-level sensor network simulation with cooja. In: First IEEE international workshop on practical issues in building sensor network applications (SenseApp 2006)

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Engineering, Sardar Vallabhbhai National Institute of Technology Surat, Surat, Gujarat, 395007, India

    A. O. Bang & Udai Pratap Rao

Authors
  1. A. O. Bang
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Udai Pratap Rao
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Udai Pratap Rao.

Additional information

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Bang, A.O., Rao, U.P. A novel decentralized security architecture against sybil attack in RPL-based IoT networks: a focus on smart home use case. J Supercomput 77, 13703–13738 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-021-03816-2

Download citation

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-021-03816-2

Keywords

Search

Navigation