Spam DIS Attack Against Routing Protocol in the Internet of Things

Abstract

A rapidly growing number of various sensors, objects and smart devices that are capable of communicating with each other without human intervention are leading the emergence of Internet-of-Things (IoT) and its applications. As a major building block of IoT, Low Power and Lossy Network (LLN) that consists of a set of resource-constrained nodes in terms of communication, computation, memory, and energy plays an essential role in the realization of ubiquitous computing and communication paradigm. In order to provide both efficient and reliable communication and enable the integration of resource-constrained nodes into the Internet, a novel routing protocol for LLNs, also referred to as RPL, has been proposed. However, LLNs running with RPL are vulnerable to various Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks because of inherent resource constraints, the lack of tamper resistance and security features of routing protocol. In this paper, we present and investigate a new type of DoS attack, called spam DIS attack, in swiftly burgeoning RPL-based LLNs. In spam DIS attack, the malicious node multicasts a large number of DODAG Information Solicitation (DIS) messages with different fictitious identities to cause the legitimate nodes to restart the Trickle algorithm and broadcast an excessive number of DODAG Information Object (DIO) messages, which drain down the energy resource of legitimate nodes, and finally make the legitimate nodes suffer from denial of service. We conduct extensive simulation experiments for performance evaluation of spam DIS attack and comparison with original RPL without adversary. The simulation results indicate that the spam DIS attack is an extremely severe DoS attack in RPL-based LLNs.