Digital Signature Based Countermeasure Against Puppet Attack in the Internet of Things

In order to achieve the goal of smooth interaction and communication, a novel distance vector and source routing protocol, also officially referred to as RPL, has been proposed for IPv6-based Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) which serve as a major component in the architecture of Internet of Things (IoT). Unfortunately, IoT devices are often equipped with limited energy and extremely constrained with regard to the capabilities of computing and communicating, thus, IoT and its applications are seriously vulnerable to diverse cyber attacks, and investigating possible attacks against IoT-related routing protocol is a top priority to enhance the security of IoT systems in the future. In this paper, we propose a digital signature based countermeasure along with other techniques to defend against puppet attack in LLNs running with RPL. The experimental results indicate that the proposed digital signature based countermeasure can not only reduce the performance impact of puppet attack significantly, but also can accurately detect and effectively mitigate puppet attack.