Analysis of the RPL Version Number Attack with Multiple Attackers

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Presented at CyberScience2020 2020 by

Ahmet Oktug

In this study, we aim to understand the effect of multiple Version Number Attackers (VNA) in RPL (IPv6Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks)-based Internet of Things (IoT) networks. VNA is one of themost detrimental Denial of Service (DoS) attack that targets the availability of IoT networks. Almost all of the studiestargeting the VNA considered a single attacker. However, once an attacker has a chance to compromise a node inthe network, it may easily compromise more devices, thus 1) affect the performance of the network more and misusethe resources quicker, 2) circumvent the existing security mechanisms and 3) perform other attacks which requiremore than one malicious node (e.g., wormhole, etc.). Therefore, we have to take multiple attackers into account whendesigning security systems. In this work, we analyze the effect of multiple attackers from various points of view.Based on extensive simulations and analysis, we conclude that increasing the number of attackers affects only thepacket delivery ratio and does not affect average network delay and average power consumption. Our results alsoshow that, attacking positions closer to the root cause longer delays and higher power consumption results whilecentral attacking positions are more effective on packet delivery ratio. Lastly, we evaluate the performance of arecently proposed mitigation technique against multiple attackers.