A novel Network Partitioning Attack against Routing Protocol in Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) environment comprises large scale deployment of constrained devices like RFIDs and sensors making routing an essential requirement. These constrained devices are part of the Low power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) in the IoT. The Internet Engineering Task Force standardized IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy Networks (RPL) as the routing protocol for LLNs in IoT. IoT-LLNs are organized as multiple Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graphs (DODAGs). The root node in the DODAG organizes and maintains the DODAG through broadcast based configuration information dissemination process. The root node also connects the various nodes in the DODAG to the rest of the IoT network. Hence, for any node in the IoT-LLN, connectivity with the root node is important. We present a novel Network Partitioning Attack (NPA) scenario against RPL in IoT-LLNs wherein a malicious node segregates a section of the IoT-LLN from the root node and thus from the rest of the IoT network. In this paper, we discuss in-depth the vulnerabilities of RPL, which result in the proposed Network Partitioning Attack. We present an analytical model to demonstrate the impact of the attack on the performance of the routing protocol and validate the model through simulation. We also suggest mechanisms to mitigate the attack.