Topic Secure RPL protocol Approach Secure Communication Protocol for IoT Networks

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) introduces significant challenges in secure communication due to the lack of computational capacity and energy-efficient devices. RPL (Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks) is a traditional routing protocol that is vulnerable to several attacks such as Rank, Sinkhole, and Sybil attacks. This study focuses on enhancing the security of RPL by implementing and testing an enhanced version designed to prevent these vulnerabilities, this version called SRPL protocol stands for secure RPL protocol. In our secure RPL workflow, every node first establishes a shared secret key with their parent using a Diffie-ZKP method that provides confidentiality and publicly authenticates public keys. The parent then sends a secure DIO which contains a significant amount of rank information, and a Schnorr signature for integrity. The child node calculates its rank, sends it to its parent for ratification and signature, then includes the signed rank in all DIOs. Other nodes will only accept DIOs where the signature is about the rank the node was approved for, eliminating fake rank attacks, and trusted routing. Using Contiki OS and the Cooja simulator, a set of experiments was carried out through a series of tests comparing the performance of standard RPL and SRPL under various attack scenarios. Where a set of metrics such as Initialization Time, Message Delay, Packet Delivery were measured, especially in situations involving routing-based attacks. The results demonstrate that SRPL significantly enhances network security while maintaining comparable performance to the original protocol. This research is a step forward in securing the IoT environments and enabling reliable communication in low-power communication networks.