Battery Drain Denial-of-Service Attacks and Defenses in the Internet of Things

IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is a popular routing protocol used in wireless sensor networks and in the Internet of Things (IoT). RPL was standardized by the IETF in 2012 and has been designed for devices with limited resources and capabilities. Open-source RPL implementations are supported by popular IoT operating systems (OS), such as ContikiOS and TinyOS. In this work, we investigate the possibility of battery drain Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks in the RPL implementation of ContikiOS. In particular, we use the popular Cooja simulator and implement two types of DoS attacks, particularly version number modification and “Hello” flooding. We demonstrate the impact of these attacks on the power consumption of IoT devices. Finally, we discuss potential defenses relying on distributed intrusion detection modules.