Monitoring and Security for the RPL-based Internet of Things
Anthéa Mayzaud · HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2016
The growing interest for the Internet of Things (IoT) has resulted in the large scale deployment of Low power and Lossy Networks (LLN). These networks are strongly constrained in terms of resources and communicate using unstable links. In this context, existing routing protocols for traditional networks do not cope with all these constraints. The IETF has proposed a new routing protocol called RPL based on IPv6 and specifically designed for these environments. The RPL protocol is however exposed to a large variety of attacks. The deployment of security mechanisms may also be quite expensive for the nodes. Therefore, LLN networks present new challenges in terms of monitoring and security. In this thesis we propose to investigate a security-oriented monitoring approach for addressing the trade-off between security and cost in the IoT. In a first stage, we assess security threats faced by these networks by identifying and classifying attacks through a dedicated taxonomy. We also quantify the consequences of two major attacks called DAG inconsistency attacks and version number attacks causing over-consumption of node resources. We then focus our work on security solutions for RPL-based IoT. We propose a local strategy for addressing DAG inconsistency attacks. In order to detect complex attacks such as version number attacks and to complement our node-level approach, we design a security-oriented distributed monitoring architecture for RPL networks. This solution allows us to preserve constrained nodes energy by performing monitoring and detection activities on dedicated nodes. We quantify the performance and the cost of this architecture and the deployed detection modules.