Security Against Rank Attack in RPL Protocol

The Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is experiencing a wave of security threats, due to the need of its utility in the Internet of Things (IoT). RPL is so far considered as one of the most utilized routing protocols in new IoT applications, which is one of the reasons the latter may lead to confronting challenges later on. In other words, security is thus the primary interest in RPL, regarding the nature of objects and their different constraints that are regularly regarded as security vulnerabilities for cyber-attacks. To continue, it is evident to claim that it is mandatory to determine and analyze all the kinds of attacks that target this protocol, such as the rank attack which is best known for its strongest threats that lead to degraded topology performance and energy consumption of nodes in the network. This study presents an overview of RPL, a proposed taxonomy of all the recent published works about rank attacks as well as the different mitigation methods, and the damage caused on network parameters. To conclude, a comparison between several attacks has been adopted using the Friedman test, and a discussion has been presented with some other recent research concerning security against rank attack.