An Algorithm for Detection of Blackhole Attack on RPL

Abstract

The Internet of things (IoT) is an emerging technology, which seems to have a promising future in linking the real and virtual world and hence changing the way we experience the world. As its implementation increases, attacks performed on it will also increase. Since it is connected with the physical world, the attacks can result in a serious damage. Consequently, it is required to provide protection mechanisms against the attacks. 
Blackhole attack is one of the attacks, which is performed on RPL (Routing Protocol for Low- Power and Lossy Networks). In RPL network, the nodes connect to the network forming a tree topology. There are parents and children nodes, and packet is transferred only from children to parent or parent to children until it reaches its destination. In a blackhole attack, attacker node drops packets passing towards it, resulting in the packets from and towards its children not reaching their destination. This attack can result a serious consequence especially where real time data transfer is required. 
In this work, an algorithm is designed for detecting the existence of blackhole attack. After an attack is detected, the attacker node (blackhole node) is identified and removed from the network. Blackhole attack is simulated using the Cooja simulator and the provided algorithm is tested by using packet delivery rate and energy consumption as evaluation metrics. Ensuring the improvement of packet delivery rate is vital because blackhole node drops packets. Additionally, IoT contains resource constrained devices and hence energy consumption has to be as minimal as possible. 
The provided algorithm has successfully detected the existence of blackhole attack and the blackhole nodes are successfully identified and removed from the network. The simulation shows that the designed algorithm has improved the packet delivery rate without resulting higher energy consumption for a network of up to 22 nodes.