An Effective Approach to Protecting Low-Power and Lossy IoT Networks Against Blackhole Attacks

Realizing the applications of Internet of Things (IoT) with the goal of achieving a more efficient and automated world requires billions of connected smart devices and the minimization of hardware cost in these devices. As a result, many IoT devices do not have sufficient resources to support various protocols required in many IoT applications. Because of this, new protocols have been introduced to support the integration of these devices. One of these protocols is the increasingly popular routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL). However, this protocol is well known to attract blackhole and sinkhole attacks and cause serious difficulties when using more computationally intensive techniques to protect against these attacks, such as intrusion detection systems and rank authentication schemes. In this paper, an effective approach is presented to protect RPL networks against blackhole attacks. The approach does not address sinkhole attacks because they cause low damage and are often used along blackhole attacks and can be detected when blackhole attaches are detected. This approach uses the feature of multiple parents per node and a parent evaluation system enabling nodes to select more reliable routes. Simulations have been conducted, compared to existing approaches this approach would provide better protection against blackhole attacks with much lower overheads for small RPL networks.