IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is the standard network layer protocol for achieving efficient routing in IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN). Resource-constrained and non-tamper resistant nature of smart sensor nodes makes RPL protocol susceptible to different threats. An attacker may use insider or outsider attack strategy to perform Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks against RPL based networks. Security and Privacy risks associated with RPL protocol may limit its global adoption and worldwide acceptance. A proper investigation of RPL specific attacks and their impacts on an underlying network needs to be done. In this paper, we present and investigate one of the catastrophic attacks named as a copycat attack, a type of replay based DoS attack against the RPL protocol. An in-depth experimental study for analyzing the impacts of the copycat attack on RPL has been done. The experimental results show that the copycat attack can significantly degrade network performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, and average power consumption. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first paper that extensively studies the impact of RPL specific replay mechanism based DoS attack on 6LoWPAN networks.

翻译：IPv6低功耗有损网络路由协议（RPL）是IPv6 over 低功耗无线个域网（6LoWPAN）中实现高效路由的标准网络层协议。智能传感器节点资源受限且防篡改能力不足的特性，使RPL协议易受多种威胁。攻击者可能采用内部或外部攻击策略，对基于RPL的网络实施拒绝服务（DoS）攻击。RPL协议相关的安全与隐私风险可能限制其全球采用和广泛接受。因此，需要对RPL特定攻击及其对底层网络的影响进行系统研究。本文提出并研究了一种名为复制猫攻击的灾难性攻击，这是一种针对RPL协议的基于重放的DoS攻击。我们通过深入的实验研究分析了复制猫攻击对RPL的影响。实验结果表明，复制猫攻击会显著降低网络性能，具体表现为数据包投递率降低、平均端到端时延增加以及平均功耗上升。据我们所知，本文是首个全面研究基于RPL特定重放机制的DoS攻击对6LoWPAN网络影响的论文。