VeRA - Version Number and Rank Authentication in RPL

Abstract

Abstract-Designing a routing protocol for large low-power and lossy networks (LLNs), consisting of thousands of constrained nodes and unreliable links, presents new challenges. The IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low-power and Lossy Networks (RPL), have been developed by the IETF ROLL Working Group as a preferred routing protocol to provide IPv6 routing functionality in LLNs. RPL provides path diversity by building and maintaining directed acyclic graphs (DAG) rooted at one (or more) gateway. However, an adversary that impersonates a gateway or has compromised one of the nodes close to the gateway can divert a large part of network traffic forward itself and/or exhaust the nodes' batteries. Therefore in RPL, special security care must be taken when the Destination Oriented Directed Acyclic Graph (DODAG) root is updating the Version Number by which reconstruction of the routing topology can be initiated. The same care also must be taken to prevent an internal attacker (compromised DODAG node) to publish decreased Rank value, which causes a large part of the DODAG to connect to the DODAG root via the attacker and give it the ability to eavesdrop a large part of the network traffic forward itself. Unfortunately, the currently available security services in RPL will not protect against a compromised internal node that can construct and disseminate fake messages. In this paper, a new security service is described that prevents any misbehaving node from illegitimately increasing the Version Number and compromise illegitimate decreased Rank values.

A Survey of Potential Security Issues in Existing Wireless Sensor Network Protocols

“…On the other side, in the case of rank attack an adversary can attract the large traffic by advertising false rank value, so non-optimal routes might be established. Solutions to address this problem are given in [60] and [61].…”

“…Separate keys for network segments [48] PS The solution was not implemented/simulated yet; Merkel trees authentication [54] PS Node uses a key to encrypt its messages; High jitter and E2E delay until tree has been established; Graph theoretic approach [55] PS Cryptographic techniques based on local broadcast keys; Low overhead, no synchronization needed; Sybil attack, Clone ID Distributed hash tables (DHT) to store the graphical location of nodes [48], [56] PS Problem in how to securely verify the node location; Might not scale well with large networks; DAG/DAO inconsistency attack Limit the rate of tickle timer resets [57] PS Threshold value is fixed, no network or node characteristics are taken into account; Adaptive threshold [58] PS Takes into account the network characteristics; Dynamic approach [59] PS Improved version as node specific parameters are used; Rank attack VeRa [60] PS Authentication mechanism based on hash operations; Low time overhead, but still vulnerable to rank attacks by forgery and replay; TRAIL [61] PS Improvement of VeRa, requires almost no cryptography, but shows dependency on network sizes; choose to selectively forward data or drop all received packets. In both scenarios the network operation would be disturbed.…”

Security of Internet of Things for a Reliable Internet of Services

“…In this section, readers can find the studies which either propose a security solution or mitigate the effect of the attacks. Dvir et al proposed VeRA [16], a security solution for the crucial version number and rank parameters carried in DIO messages in 2011. Their solution makes use of hash chains and message authentication codes in order to securely exchange these RPL parameters in DIO messages.…”

A Study of RPL DODAG Version Attacks

“…Version number attacks have also been suggested previously [12,13], but their effects have not been analyzed to understand whether it would be prudent to mitigate such attacks or not. The Version Number and Rank Authentication (VeRA) [13] approach provides integrity of version numbers and ranks advertised in control messages via hash and signature operations.…”

“…The Version Number and Rank Authentication (VeRA) [13] approach provides integrity of version numbers and ranks advertised in control messages via hash and signature operations. Their approach is not only shown to be faulty by the authors of [14], but another mechanism called TRAIL that uses the root as a trust anchor and monotonically increases node ranks is also proposed by them.…”