A Lightweight Energy-Efficient Algorithm for mitigation and isolation of Internal Rank Attackers in RPL based Internet of Things

Internet of Things (IoT) has become a pivotal technology for connecting various physical things or devices to the
internet. Despite the potential advantages, security in IoT network continues to be a major concern due to
enormous volume of the data generated and transmitted. Since the devices in IoT are resource-constrained and
heterogeneous, it is becoming harder to maintain security in routing protocols such as Routing Protocol for Lowpower
and Lossy networks (RPL). RPL uses control packets for the construction of tree topology and it is prone to
various attacks such as flood, version, rank and so on. Rank attack leads to the formation of loop, increased
latency in packet delivery, energy depletion in nodes, decreased delivery ratio of packets and so on. Since the
impact of the rank attack is high on the network, a lightweight energy-efficient algorithm is needed for the
detection and isolation of rank attackers. The proposed Rank Attack Detection (RAD) algorithm uses a noncryptographic
hash algorithm to preserve the integrity of control packets. It uses random sampling to reduce
energy consumption. Once the rank attacker is detected, an alarm is generated against the attackers. The alarm is
not a separate control packet; it is appended to the control message itself. The proposed algorithm is analysed
using different topologies by comparing it with the already existing algorithms in terms of control packet
overhead, delivery ratio, latency for delivery of data packets, accuracy and energy consumption. It achieves
better accuracy in grid-centered topology and the average energy consumption is reduced in random topology