Title: Robust link-assessment-based approach for detection and isolation of blackhole attacker in resource constraint internet of things

Authors: Himanshu B. Patel; Devesh C. Jinwala

Addresses: Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SVNIT-Surat, Surat, Gujarat, India ' Department of Computer Science and Engineering, SVNIT-Surat, Surat, Gujarat, India

Abstract: Blackhole is one of the crucial packet-dropping attacks that can be launched on routing protocol for low-power lossy networks (RPL) protocol. In this paper, we propose an improved specification-based approach for integrating trust value in specification-based approach to detect and isolate blackhole attackers, based on a tangible value of packet-forwarding behaviour of the nodes in the network. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to integrate packet-forwarding trust with the specification-based approach. In our proposed approach, lightweight-specification data are maintained at each device and shared periodically with the resource-rich edge device. Resource-insensitive computations are carried out at the edge device. The proposed approach uses a robust data collaboration mechanism that ensures detection-data delivery between nodes and edge devices, even in the presence of 10% of attacker nodes. Our simulations on Cooja simulator show that in an environment with 20% data loss, the proposed approach yields more than 80% true-positive rate.

Keywords: internet of things; IoT; routing protocol for low-power lossy networks; RPL; blackhole attack; trust.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2025.143463

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2025 Vol.28 No.1, pp.100 - 113

Received: 17 Jul 2023
Accepted: 31 Jan 2024
Published online: 21 Dec 2024 *

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