Energy Depletion Attack Against Routing Protocol in the Internet of Things

Low power and lossy networks (LLNs) are undeniably vulnerable to various Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks due to the shared wireless medium, the lack of physical protection, and instinctive resource constraints. In this paper, we propose a misbehavior-aware threshold detection scheme, called MAD, against energy depletion attack in RPL-based LLNs, where a malicious node intentionally generates and sends a large number of packets to legitimate nodes to excessively consume the energy resource of intermediate nodes located along the forwarding paths, and finally makes the resource-constrained network suffer from denial of service. In the MAD, each node maintains a count of the number of received packets from its child node within a specific time window, and then compares the count with a dynamically calculated threshold to detect potential malicious node. We conduct extensive simulation experiments for performance evaluation and comparison with the original RPL with and without adversary, respectively. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme is a viable approach against energy depletion attack in RPL-based LLNs.