Enhanced Timestamp Scheme for Mitigating Replay Attacks in Secure ZigBee Networks

ZigBee stack has been introduced to satisfy the requirements for low-cost equipment and low-power consumption of the Internet of Things (IoT) infrastructure. To meet these requirements, many communication features are disabled or minimized, which affects the efficienty of the ZigBee network security. Previous work assumes that the deployment of frame counters is a good mechanism for blocking the replay attack in ZigBee networks. However, this paper proves that ZigBee networks, even with frame counters deployed, are still vulnerable to replay attacks. Moreover, we propose an enhanced timestamp scheme to block the replay attack permanently while maintaining low-power consumption. The proposed solution covers all ZigBee topologies and ZigBee End Devices (ZEDs) cases.