Resolving the Decreased Rank Attack in RPL's IoT Networks

The Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy networks (RPL) has been developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standardization body to serve as a part of the 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks) standard, a core communication technology for the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. RPL organizes its network in the form of a tree-like structure where a node is configured as the root of the tree while others integrate themselves into that structure based on their relative distance. A value called the Rank is used to define each node's relative position and it is used by other nodes to take their routing decisions. A malicious node can illegitimately claim a closer position to the root by advertising a lower rank value trapping other nodes to forward their traffic through that malicious node. In this study, we show how this behavior can have a detrimental side effect on the network via extensive simulations and propose a new secure objective function to prevent such an attack.