DIO Suppression Attack Against Routing in the Internet of Things

Recent standardization efforts are consolidating the role of routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPL) as the standard routing protocol for IPv6-based wireless sensor and actuator networks. Investigating possible attacks against RPL is a top priority to improve the security of the future Internet of Things systems. In this letter, we present the DIO suppression attack, a novel degradation-of-service attack against RPL. Unlike other attacks in the literature, the DIO suppression attack does not require to steal cryptographic keys from some legitimate node. We show that the attack severely degrades the routing service, and it is far less energy-expensive than a jamming attack.