A Lightweight Defense Approach to Mitigate Version Number and Rank Attacks in Low-Power and Lossy Networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents a new paradigm of the future internet that intends to provide interactive communication between various processing object via heterogeneous networks. The routing protocol in the IoT environment is Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL). The current RPL specification defines primary security modes; therefore it is vulnerable to topological attacks. In this paper the RPL routing mechanism, its topological vulnerabilities and two important topological attacks namely version number attack and rank spoofing attack are analyzed. To counter the mentioned attacks, a lightweight Identity Based Offline�Online Signature based scheme is proposed. Our evaluation shows that our proposed scheme is secure in the random oracle model, and in terms of computational cost and energy consumption efficiently counters with these attacks. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature