Mitigation of black hole attacks in Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks

Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) has been standardized by the Internet Engineering Task Force to efficiently manage the functions of the network layer when providing Internet connectivity for wireless sensor networks. RPL has been designed for constrained devices and networks. Owing to their constrained nature, RPL-based networks can be exposed to a wide variety of security attacks. One of the most serious attacks in RPL is a black hole attack, where a malicious node silently drops all the packets that it is supposed to forward. This paper proposes a mitigation technique against black hole attack with low packet loss and high reliability. The proposed technique consists of a local decision and a global verification process. First, each node observes the communication behavior of its neighboring nodes by overhearing packets transmitted by its neighbors and attempts to identify suspicious nodes based on their behavior. In the second process, if a node identifies a suspicious node, then it verifies whether the suspicious node is a black hole. We demonstrate that the proposed approach increases packet delivery rate significantly and detects black hole attack effectively. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.