A Survey on Layer-Wise Security Attacks in IoT: Attacks, Countermeasures, and Open-Issues

© 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Security is a mandatory issue in any network, where sensitive data are transferred safely in the required direction. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are the networks formed in hostile areas for different applications. Whatever the application, the WSNs must gather a large amount of sensitive data and send them to an authorized body, generally a sink. WSN has integrated with Internet-of-Things (IoT) via internet access in sensor nodes along with internet-connected devices. The data gathered with IoT are enormous, which are eventually collected by WSN over the Internet. Due to several resource constraints, it is challenging to design a secure sensor network, and for a secure IoT it is essential to have a secure WSN. Most of the traditional security techniques do not work well for WSN. The merger of IoT and WSN has opened new challenges in designing a secure network. In this paper, we have discussed the challenges of creating a secure WSN. This research reviews the layer-wise security protocols for WSN and IoT in the literature. There are several issues and challenges for a secure WSN and IoT, which we have addressed in this research. This research pinpoints the new research opportunities in the security issues of both WSN and IoT. This survey climaxes in abstruse psychoanalysis of the network layer attacks. Finally, various attacks on the network using Cooja, a simulator of ContikiOS, are simulated.Peer reviewe

Security of the Internet of Things: Vulnerabilities, Attacks and Countermeasures

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) constitute one of the most promising third-millennium technologies and have wide range of applications in our surrounding environment. The reason behind the vast adoption of WSNs in various applications is that they have tremendously appealing features, e.g., low production cost, low installation cost, unattended network operation, autonomous and longtime operation. WSNs have started to merge with the Internet of Things (IoT) through the introduction of Internet access capability in sensor nodes and sensing ability in Internet-connected devices. Thereby, the IoT is providing access to huge amount of data, collected by the WSNs, over the Internet. Hence, the security of IoT should start with foremost securing WSNs ahead of the other components. However, owing to the absence of a physical line-of-defense, i.e., there is no dedicated infrastructure such as gateways to watch and observe the flowing information in the network, security of WSNs along with IoT is of a big concern to the scientific community. More specifically, for the application areas in which CIA (confidentiality, integrity, availability) has prime importance, WSNs and emerging IoT technology might constitute an open avenue for the attackers. Besides, recent integration and collaboration of WSNs with IoT will open new challenges and problems in terms of security. Hence, this would be a nightmare for the individuals using these systems as well as the security administrators who are managing those networks. Therefore, a detailed review of security attacks towards WSNs and IoT, along with the techniques for prevention, detection, and mitigation of those attacks are provided in this paper. In this text, attacks are categorized and treated into mainly two parts, most or all types of attacks towards WSNs and IoT are investigated under that umbrella: “Passive Attacks” and “Active Attacks”. Understanding these attacks and their associated defense mechanisms will help paving a secure path towards the proliferation and public acceptance of IoT technology

Exploring placement of intrusion detection systems in rpl-based internet of things

Intrusion detection is an indispensable part of RPL security due to its nature opening to attacks from insider attackers. While there are a good deal of studies that analyze different types of attack and propose intrusion detection systems based on various techniques that are proposed in the literature, how to place such intrusion detection systems on RPL topology is not investigated. This is the main contribution of this study, and three intrusion detection architectures based on central and distributed placement of intrusion detection nodes are analyzed rigorously against different types of attacks and attackers at various locations in the RPL topology and evaluated from different aspects including their effectiveness, cost, and security.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figures, research articl

Trust-aware and Cooperative Routing Protocol for IoT Security

The resource-constrained nature of IoT objects makes the Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (RPL) vulnerable to several attacks. Although RPL specification provides encryption protection to control messages, RPL is still vulnerable to internal attackers and selfish behaviours. To address the lack of robust security mechanisms in RPL, we designed a new Metric-based RPL Trustworthiness Scheme (MRTS) that introduces trust evaluation for secure routing topology construction. Extensive simulations show that MRTS is efficient and performant with respect to packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, and nodes’ rank changes. In addition, a mathematical modelling analysis shows that MRTS meets the requirements of consistency, optimality, and loop-freeness, and that the proposed trustbased routing metric has the isotonicity and monotonicity properties required for a routing protocol. By using game theory concepts, we formally describe MRTS as a strategy for the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma and demonstrate its cooperation enforcement characteristic. Both mathematical analysis and evolutionary simulation results show clearly that MRTS, as a strategy is an effective approach in promoting the stability and the evolution of the Internet of Things network

A Trust-Based Intrusion Detection System for RPL Networks: Detecting a Combination of Rank and Blackhole Attacks

Routing attacks are a major security issue for Internet of Things (IoT) networks utilising routing protocols, as malicious actors can overwhelm resource-constrained devices with denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, notably rank and blackhole attacks. In this work, we study the impact of the combination of rank and blackhole attacks in the IPv6 routing protocol for low-power and lossy (RPL) networks, and we propose a new security framework for RPL-based IoT networks (SRF-IoT). The framework includes a trust-based mechanism that detects and isolates malicious attackers with the help of an external intrusion detection system (IDS). Both SRF-IoT and IDS are implemented in the Contiki-NG operating system. Evaluation of the proposed framework is based on simulations using the Whitefield framework that combines both the Contiki-NG and the NS-3 simulator. Analysis of the simulations of the scenarios under active attacks showed the effectiveness of deploying SRF-IoT with 92.8% packet delivery ratio (PDR), a five-fold reduction in the number of packets dropped, and a three-fold decrease in the number of parent switches in comparison with the scenario without SRF-IoT. Moreover, the packet overhead introduced by SRF-IoT in attack scenarios is minimal at less than 2%. Obtained results suggest that the SRF-IoT framework is an efficient and promising solution that combines trust-based and IDS-based approaches to protect IoT networks against routing attacks. In addition, our solution works by deploying a watchdog mechanism on detector nodes only, leaving unaffected the operation of existing smart devices

Sinkhole Detection in IOT using Elliptic Curve Digital Signature

A variety of smart applications, including homes, transportation, health, and robots in industries, are starting to gain interest due to the fast expansion of Internet of Things (IoT). Smart devices are made up of sensors and actuators that actively involved in monitoring, prediction, security, and information sharing in the IoT ecosystem. These state-of-the-art (SOTA) technologies enable people to monitor and manage their unified milieu in real-time. IoT devices are nevertheless regularly used in hostile situations, where attackers try to grab and penetrate them to take over the entire network. Due to the possibility of selective forwarding, sinkhole, blackhole, and wormhole attacks on IoT networks is a serious security risk. This research offers an effective method using a digital signature to detect and mitigate sinkhole attacks on IoT networks to resolve this problem. By doing a thorough security study of this suggested system, it shows how safe it is and how resistant it is to secure sinkhole attack detection. In this study, elliptic curve digital signature algorithm is used along with the node ranker to detect the sinkhole attack in IoT environment. According to the performance analysis and experimental findings compared to other research, the suggested system offers good detection accuracy and greatly lowers the overhead associated with computing, communication, and storage