A lightweight signcryption scheme for defense against fragment duplication attack in the 6LoWPAN networks

The Internet of Things (IoT) presents a new paradigm of the future Internet that intends to provide interactive communication between various processing objects via heterogeneous networks. The IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN) is an IPv6 adaptation sub-layer and provides the requirements of IP connectivity between resource-constrained devices in lossy, low power networks. Since the size of a packet in the IPv6 is larger than the size of a frame in the IEEE 802.15.4, the 6LoWPAN adaptation layer performs packet fragmentation. In this paper, first, the 6LoWPAN fragmentation mechanism in terms of security issues is analyzed and then, fragment duplication attack which an attacker can selectively disrupt the reassembly of fragments of a particular packet at a receiver node is identified. Next, signcryption, which is a high performance cryptographic primitive, is discussed. Finally, a lightweight Offline-Online SignCryption (OOSC) scheme is proposed to counter fragment duplication attack. The evaluation shows that the proposed scheme is secure in the random oracle model and in terms of computational cost, and energy consumption efficiently counters with this attack. © 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature