The Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy networks (RPL) has been developed by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) standardization body to serve as a part of the 6LoWPAN (IPv6 over Low-Power Wireless Personal Area Networks) standard, a core communication technology for the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. RPL organizes its network in the form of a tree-like structure where a node is configured as the root of the tree while others integrate themselves into that structure based on their relative distance. A value called the Rank is used to define each node's relative position and it is used by other nodes to take their routing decisions. A malicious node can illegitimately claim a closer position to the root by advertising a lower rank value trapping other nodes to forward their traffic through that malicious node. In this study, we show how this behavior can have a detrimental side effect on the network via extensive simulations and propose a new secure objective function to prevent such an attack.

翻译：低功耗有损网络路由协议（RPL）由互联网工程任务组（IETF）标准化机构制定，作为6LoWPAN（基于低功耗无线个域网的IPv6）标准的一部分，该标准是物联网（IoT）网络的核心通信技术。RPL以树状结构组织网络，其中某个节点被配置为树的根节点，其他节点则根据其相对距离融入该结构。RPL使用一个名为"排名"（Rank）的值来定义每个节点的相对位置，其他节点依据该值做出路由决策。恶意节点可能通过声明较低的Rank值，非法宣称自己更接近根节点，从而诱使其他节点将流量转发至该恶意节点。在本研究中，我们通过大量仿真展示了这种行为对网络产生的负面副作用，并提出了一种新的安全目标函数来防范此类攻击。