Analysis and Implementation of Sinkhole Attack in RPL

Abstract

The routing protocol for low power and lossy networks (RPL) is recommended by internet engineering task force (IETF) for IPv6 based Low power personal area network (6LowPAN). RPL is proactive routing protocol for internet of things that has applications in smart homes, smart cities and smart world. RPL creates directed acyclic graphs (DAG) of the network topology. In this project we introduce a sinkhole attack in which the attacker’s aim is to attract more traffic from a particular area through a compromised node. In RPL this attack can be easily performed through the manipulation of the rank. By falsifying (decreasing) the rank of a node one can make it attract more traffic and thus sinkhole attack can be implemented. Because of this falsified advertisement, the malicious node is more frequently chosen as parent by the other nodes. Then we have analyzed the topology, average power, average radio duty cycle and the power history of the malicious node. From the analysis we conclude that the power and radio duty cycle due to malicious node increases.