A new lightweight decentralized mitigation solution against Version Number Attacks for IoT Networks

• Published in: J.UCS (Annual print and CD-ROM archive ed.) Vol. 29; no. 2; pp. 118 - 151
• Main Authors: Rouissat, Mehdi, Belkheir, Mohammed, Belkhira, Hicham Sid Ahmed, Boukli Hacene, Sofiane, Lorenz, Pascal, Bouziani, Merahi
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bristol Pensoft Publishers 01.01.2023; Graz University of Technology
• Subjects: Algorithms; countermeasure; Denial of service attacks; Energy consumption; IoT; Lightweight; Network latency; Nodes; RPL; security; version number
• ISSN: 0948-695X; 0948-6968
• DOI: 10.3897/jucs.85506

The present work describes a new technique to mitigate the version number attack (VNA), which is classified as one among the known denial of service (DDoS) damaging attacks targeting RPL-based (Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks) IoTs networks. Through a VNA, the malicious behavior induces an increase in the control overhead and affects nodes' ressources in terms of processing and memory, thereby the network availability is directly targeted. The lightweight proposed algorithm is run by each node where the main purpose is to halt the spread of a faked version number over the network and to recover victim nodes. The proposed solution has been implemented and simulated using Cooja under Contiki OS. Simulation results obviously show that our proposed technique promises significant improvements in various measured metrics while optimizing the node resources in terms of processing and memory usage. Compared to the network under attack, the control overhead has been shortened by 83% and the energy consumption has been reduced by 74%. In addition, the packet delivery ratio (PDR) has been improved to reach (99,6%), and the latency has been restored to attain the same value as in the normal case.