The effect of buffer management strategies on 6LoWPAN's response to buffer reservation attacks

The 6L0WPAN adaptation layer is widely used in many Internet of Things (IoT) and vehicular networking applications. The current IoT framework [1], which introduced 6LoWPAN to the TCP/IP model, does not specif the implementation for managing its received-fragments buffer. This paper looks into the effect of current implementations of buffer management strategies at 6LoWPAN's response in case of fragmentation-based, buffer reservation Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The Packet Drop Rate (PDR) is used to analyze how successful the attacker is for each management technique. Our investigation uses different defence strategies, which include our implementation of the Split Buffer mechanism [2] and a modified version of this mechanism that we devise in this paper as well. In particular, we introduce dynamic calculation for the average time between consecutive fragments and the use of a list of previously dropped packets tags. NS3 is used to simulate all the implementations. Our results show that using a 'slotted' buffer would enhance 6LoWPAN's response against these attacks. The simulations also provide an in-depth look at using scoring systems to manage buffer cleanups