The impact of copycat attack on RPL based 6LoWPAN networks in Internet of Things

IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is the standard network layer protocol for achieving efficient routing in IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). Resource-constrained and non-tamper resistant nature of smart sensor nodes makes RPL protocol susceptible to different threats. An attacker may use insider or outsider attack strategy to perform Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks against RPL based networks. Security and Privacy risks associated with RPL protocol may limit its global adoption and worldwide acceptance. A proper investigation of RPL specific attacks and their impacts on an underlying network needs to be done. In this paper, we present and investigate one of the catastrophic attacks named as a copycat attack, a type of replay based DoS attack against the RPL protocol. An in-depth experimental study for analyzing the impacts of the copycat attack on RPL has been done. The experimental results show that the copycat attack can significantly degrade network performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, and average power consumption. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that extensively studies the impact of RPL specific replay mechanism based DoS attack on 6LoWPAN networks.