Improving Security and Performance of the RPL Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks

• Author / Creator

  Shabani Baghani, Ahmad

• The Internet of Things (IoT) is an emerging technology that is connecting billions of otherwise ordinary devices to the Internet. A key component of IoT is Low- power and Lossy Networks (LLNs), composed of various resource-constrained devices with limited energy, memory, and processing power. To communicate with each other, devices (referred to as nodes) in LLNs require an efficient routing protocol. ROLL (Routing Over Low power and Lossy networks), a working group of the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), designed RPL, the standard IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks, to meet specific needs of LLNs.
  RPL generates low control plane traffic and offers a range of interesting features for LLNs. However, RPL has several deficiencies with regard to security and point-to-point communications.
  This thesis investigates and tackles some of these deficiencies.

  Chapter 3 introduces and analyses the DAO induction attack, a new attack against RPL.
  In the DAO induction attack, a compromised node in the network periodically transmits a special
  control message. Each of these crafted control messages induces many nodes in the network to transmit in response.
  This significantly increases the power consumption of nodes, hence reducing the lifetime of battery-operated IoT devices.
  In addition, the attack severely impacts end-to-end latency and packet delivery ratio, two important network performance metrics.
  The chapter proposes a lightweight solution to counter the attack.
  The proposed solution imposes no overhead when the network is in its normal operation (i.e., it is not under attack) and can quickly detect the attack even when the network experiences high packet loss rates.

  Chapter 4 studies the sender's authentication problem in RPL and proposes a solution based on the Blom key pre-distribution scheme. The proposed solution has a significantly lower computation cost than the original Blom scheme, hence is more suitable for computationally constrained IoT devices.

  Finally, Chapter 5 studies the quality of the RPL's Point-to-Point (P2P) paths.
  In particular, it analyzes how much RPL's P2P paths ``stretch'' compared to the shortest paths.
  It shows that the average stretch is a factor of at least two in any RPL network.
  Furthermore, it shows that RPL's stretch factor can be considerably higher than two in some network topologies including linear networks and grid networks.
  To improve the quality of RPL's P2P paths, the chapter proposes a solution that is simple to implement and fully compatible with RPL.

• Subjects / Keywords

  • RPL
  • Internet of Things
  • Low Power and Lossy Networks

• Graduation date

  Spring 2022

• Type of Item

  Thesis

• Degree

  Doctor of Philosophy

• DOI

  https://doi.org/10.7939/r3-9a9s-g013

• License

  This thesis is made available by the University of Alberta Libraries with permission of the copyright owner solely for non-commercial purposes. This thesis, or any portion thereof, may not otherwise be copied or reproduced without the written consent of the copyright owner, except to the extent permitted by Canadian copyright law.