Investigating Routing Protocol Attacks on Low Power and Lossy IoT Networks

Internet-of-things (IoT) networks are distinguished by nodes with limited computational power and storage capacity, making Low Power and Lossy Networks (LLNs) protocols essential for effective communication in resource-constrained environments. One such protocol is the Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy networks (RPL), which establishes and manages routes in RPL-based networks. RPL contributes to optimized routing and reduced network overhead in LLNs. However, the RPL-based protocol is susceptible to various internal and external vulnerabilities that require thorough exploration and mitigation. Experimental results illustrate the impact of several RPL attacks, including the DODAG Information Solicitation (DIS) attack, version number attack, decreased rank attack, and worst parent selection (WPS) attack. For simulation purposes, we employed the Contiki Cooja network simulator. Further, we conduct a comparative analysis of these RPL-based attacks, revealing that the WPS attack has a significant impact on the network performance compared to other attacks mentioned in the paper.