Defense Denial-of Service Attacks on IPv6 Wireless Sensor Networks

As IoT (Internet of Things) has become popular, more tiny devices and sensors are deployed to monitor our environment. Wireless sensor network is a typical implementation of IoT. Wireless sensor networks consist of many tiny sensors with sensing and communication ability. The applications of wireless sensor networks are widely used today in battlefield guard, circumstance monitor, and traffic analysis. Point to point communication is one of the most important characteristics of IoT, and a great volume of IP address is needed for IoT applications. The existing IP protocol, IPv4, could not provide enough public IP addresses for IoT applications. IPv6 allowing 2128, or approximately 3.4 × 1038 addresses, or more than 7.9 × 1028 times as many as IPv4. It is a promising solution for IoT applications and IP shortage issues. Sensor network often carries on mission-critical tasks. Thus, security in sensor network is vital. Wormhole attack may threat the availability of networks by dropping data randomly or disturbing routing path. In this paper, we propose a detection mechanism which is based on RPL routing protocol. In RPL routing protocol, an information called “Rank” is used to avoid routing loops by computing a node’s position relative to other nodes with respect to the DODAG(Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph) root. The proposed approach detects wormhole attack by identifying abnormal Rank values. The proposed approach uses only Rank information without any extra hardware.