An Adaptive Security Scheme to Prevent Against Packet Dropping Attacks in IoT Networks

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) technology is being adopted by many businesses spanning across various
sectors including retail, industrial manufacturing etc. to increase the efficiency of their current
processes. In this regard, security of the protocols enabling IoT technologies is a crucial issue that
contributes to the success of their adoption. In a cooperative IoT environment like a smart city,
where multiple IoT applications share IoT devices for their sensing and routing requirements. In
such a network set-up, devices are vulnerable to compromise and may also exhibit selfish behavior
to boost their energy savings by dropping network packets. In this work, we propose a security
model that allows IoT devices to identify and isolate malicious/selfish nodes based on trust and
reputation of devices. We develop a request-response based trust building process that allows a
device to build trusted relationships. The proposed system is integrated with RPL to analyze its
security and performance. The experimental results show that the proposed model is effective in
handling packet dropping attacks.