A comprehensive survey on RPL routing-based attacks, defences and future directions in Internet of Things

TL;DR

This survey addresses securing RPL-based routing in IoT LLNs by providing a comprehensive attack taxonomy that classifies 33 attacks into 12 categories and a defense taxonomy with 8 strategies. It systematically reviews RPL security defenses spanning specification-based, IDS-based, trust-based, machine intelligence, threshold, cryptography, statistics, and miscellaneous approaches, and assesses them using a wide range of evaluation tools, datasets, and testbeds. The authors highlight open research challenges, including unaddressed security features, mobility, collaborative IDS, cutting-edge hardware, and AI-driven defense considerations, and propose future directions to advance practical, scalable security for RPL in evolving IoT environments. The work emphasizes real-world applicability through discussions of datasets like IRAD and RADAR, testbeds such as FIT-IoT-LAB, and simulators like Cooja, aiming to guide researchers and practitioners toward effective, resource-aware defenses against emerging RPL routing attacks.

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of digital devices like sensors, processors, embedded and communication devices that can connect to and exchange data with other devices and systems over the internet. IoT devices have limitations on power, memory, and computational resources. Researchers have developed the IPv6 Over Low-power Wireless Personal Area Network (6LoWPAN) protocols to provide wireless connectivity among these devices while overcoming the constraints on resources. 6LoWPAN has been approved subsequently by the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). The IETF Routing Over Low-power and Lossy Networks (ROLL) standardized the Routing Protocol for LLNs known as RPL (IETF RFC 6550), which is part of the 6LoWPAN stack. However, IoT devices are vulnerable to various attacks on RPL-based routing. This survey provides an in depth study of existing RPL-based attacks and defense published from year 2011 to 2024 from highly reputed journals and conferences. By thematic analysis of existing routing attacks on RPL, we developed a novel attack taxonomy which focuses on the nature of routing attacks and classifies them into 12 major categories. Subsequently, the impact of each attack on the network is analyzed and discussed real life scenarios of these attacks. Another contribution of this survey proposed a novel taxonomy for classification of defense mechanisms into 8 major categories against routing attacks based on type of defense strategy. The detailed analysis of each defense mechanism with real life applicability is explained. Furthermore, evaluation tools such as testbeds and simulators for RPL-based attack and defense are discussed and critically analyzed in terms of real world applicability. Finally, open research challenges are presented on the basis of research gaps of existing literature along with research directions for practitioners and researchers.

Figures (8)

• Figure 1: 6LoWPAN Protocol Stack
• Figure 2: Illustration of RPL DODAG
• Figure 3: Taxonomy for Classification of RPL Protocol-Based Attacks
• Figure 4: Illustration of various RPL-based Routing Attacks.
• Figure 6: Illustration of Cross-Layer Attack