A Lightweight Mitigation Approach for Addressing DDAO Attacks in RPL-based Internet of Things
Shefali Goel, Abhishek Verma, Vinod Kumar Jain · 2023
There are many Internet of Things (IoT) applications which demand an infrastructure that requires significantly less energy and supports longer operation time. Such an infrastructure is provided by Low-Power and Lossy Networks (LLN) that run on resource-constrained devices. Achieving an energy-efficient routing on such networks is a significant challenge which is addressed by the Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (RPL). The specifications of RPL are depicted in RFC 6550 by IETF. Although RPL gives many benefits to LLN, at the same time, it also attracts many security issues. One such security issue is the Dropping Destination Advertisement Object (DDAO) attack. In RPL, a client node uses Destination Advertisement Object (DAO) control messages to pass the destination information to the root node. An attacker may exploit the DAO passing mechanism of RPL to deliberately drop DAO received from child nodes and send fake Destination Advertisement Object-Acknowledgement (DAO-ACK) messages to perform a DDAO attack. The existing research work provides only a detection algorithm to detect the DDAO attack. Therefore, in this research paper, we proposed a defense technique, i.e., lightweight Acknowledgement (ACK) authentication, based on a challenge-response strategy to mitigate the attack. For this, we have used a Prime Sequence Code Matrix (PSCM) and a modified version of the DAO and DAO-ACK control packet of the standard RPL. Our proposed technique reduces the impact of attack and restores network performance significantly.