On Mitigating DIS Attacks in IoT Networks

Routing protocols deem a pivotal component of the communication stack in the Internet of Things (IoT). The ipv6 Routing Protocol for Low power and lossy networks (RPL) has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) for routing in IoT-based networks. RPL-related control messages are transmitted in the network to construct an optimized forwarding structure. A malicious insider node can attack RPL networks by sending a high number of unnecessary control messages which causes a detrimental side effect on the network performance. One of these attacks targets DIS control messages transmitted by a new node to join the network. This attack is called the DIS attack. The attacker can exploit the joining process to flood the network with a large volume of DIS messages. This paper aims to investigate the effect of DIS attacks on network performance and develop an effective technique to mitigate the adverse effects of such attacks. The proposed technique is implemented in the Contiki operating system and evaluated using the Cooja emulator. Compared to the standard RPL and other comparable work in the literature, the proposed technique retains low routing control cost, high throughput, and low energy consumption.