A Lightweight Energy-Efficient Algorithm for mitigation and isolation of Internal Rank Attackers in RPL based Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has become a pivotal technology for connecting various physical things or devices to the internet. Despite the potential advantages, security in IoT network continues to be a major concern due to enormous volume of the data generated and transmitted. Since the devices in IoT are resource-constrained and heterogeneous, it is becoming harder to maintain security in routing protocols such as Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy networks (RPL). RPL uses control packets for the construction of tree topology and it is prone to various attacks such as flood, version, rank and so on. Rank attack leads to the formation of loop, increased latency in packet delivery, energy depletion in nodes, decreased delivery ratio of packets and so on. Since the impact of the rank attack is high on the network, a lightweight energy-efficient algorithm is needed for the detection and isolation of rank attackers. The proposed Rank Attack Detection (RAD) algorithm uses a non-cryptographic hash algorithm to preserve the integrity of control packets. It uses random sampling to reduce energy consumption. Once the rank attacker is detected, an alarm is generated against the attackers. The alarm is not a separate control packet; it is appended to the control message itself. The proposed algorithm is analysed using different topologies by comparing it with the already existing algorithms in terms of control packet overhead, delivery ratio, latency for delivery of data packets, accuracy and energy consumption. It achieves better accuracy in grid-centered topology and the average energy consumption is reduced in random topology.