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

2025-01-18

Computers & electrical engineering

AI Summary

To address routing-layer security threats against the RPL protocol in IoT environments, this paper systematically surveys 12 attack categories and 37 defense mechanisms. Methodologically, it employs bibliometric analysis, RPL specification parsing, and cross-layer threat modeling to identify five common vulnerability classes. It further proposes a multi-dimensional evaluation framework for defense techniques—assessing detection accuracy, computational and communication overhead, robustness, and deployability. As key contributions, the work establishes the first holistic analytical framework covering the full attack surface, defense mechanisms, and open research challenges; innovatively identifies lightweight trusted execution environments (TEEs) and AI-driven anomaly detection as critical evolutionary directions; and provides both theoretical foundations and practical guidance for RPL security standardization and next-generation protection mechanism design. (149 words)

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Replanning and Plan Repair
• Natural Language Processing: Safety and Robustness
• Philosophy and Ethics of AI: Safety, Robustness & Trustworthiness

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Attacks and countermeasures in recommendation systems
• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Web performance, measurement, and characterization

Problem

• IoT
• RPL routing protocol
• security attacks

Innovation

• IoT Security
• RPL Protocol Analysis
• Attack-Defense Classification