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A Lightweight Defense Approach to Mitigate Version Number and Rank Attacks in Low-Power and Lossy Networks

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Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents a new paradigm of the future internet that intends to provide interactive communication between various processing object via heterogeneous networks. The routing protocol in the IoT environment is Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). The current RPL specification defines primary security modes; therefore it is vulnerable to topological attacks. In this paper the RPL routing mechanism, its topological vulnerabilities and two important topological attacks namely version number attack and rank spoofing attack are analyzed. To counter the mentioned attacks, a lightweight Identity Based Offline–Online Signature based scheme is proposed. Our evaluation shows that our proposed scheme is secure in the random oracle model, and in terms of computational cost and energy consumption efficiently counters with these attacks.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Islamic Azad University, Science and Research Branch, Tehran, Iran

    Mohammad Nikravan

  2. Department of Computer Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran

    Ali Movaghar

  3. Iran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran

    Mehdi Hosseinzadeh

  4. Computer Science, University of Human Development, Sulaimaniyah, Iraq

    Mehdi Hosseinzadeh

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  1. Mohammad Nikravan
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  2. Ali Movaghar
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  3. Mehdi Hosseinzadeh
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Correspondence to Ali Movaghar.

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Nikravan, M., Movaghar, A. & Hosseinzadeh, M. A Lightweight Defense Approach to Mitigate Version Number and Rank Attacks in Low-Power and Lossy Networks. Wireless Pers Commun 99, 1035–1059 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11277-017-5165-4

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