Securing RPL routing protocol from blackhole attacks using a trust-based mechanism

Abstract

This research addresses blackhole routing attacks —a fundamental security attack on the routing of data in IoT networks. Most IoT devices today, from medical devices to connected vehicles and even smart buildings, come bundled with the capability of communicating wirelessly with one another. Consumers are progressively embracing the concept of connected devices while recent studies indicate that security is not high on the priority list of manufacturers especially in the way these devices route and communicate data amongst themselves thus, leaving the door wide open to attacks and compromises. We propose a trust-based RPL routing protocol, which addresses the blackhole attacks. We show that our proposed system is both secure from blackhole attacks while not imposing undue overheads on network traffic.