A novel decentralized security architecture against sybil attack in RPL-based IoT networks: a focus on smart home use case

Internet of things (IoT) is renowned for being a massive revolution led by business leaders and researchers. Routing protocol for low-power and lossy network (RPL) is a standardized protocol that serves the routing need of the IPv6-based low-power and lossy networks, which are the significant enablers of the IoT technology. Despite its many outstanding features, RPL offers very low protection against different routing attacks. In this respect, we mainly emphasize on the sybil attack. Specifically, we focus on three different types of sybil attack on a realistic smart home network topology. Considering the involvement of resource-constraint devices, we propose and evaluate a novel decentralized countermeasure against these attacks. The proposed countermeasure is based on a hybrid approach that involves the use of the geographical location of the nodes and a trust value-based parent selection procedure. Along with this, we use specially configured monitoring nodes that are responsible for the detection of the malicious attacker node(s). Further, we use RPL’s multi-instance property to integrate the proposed decentralized architecture into the exiting RPL protocol. We implement the proposed countermeasure in Cooja, the Contiki operating system-based network simulator. The results obtained through our experiments validate the practicality of the proposed countermeasure.