Addressing the DAO Insider Attack in RPL’s Internet of Things Networks

In RPL routing protocol, the destination advertisement object (DAO) control messages are announced by the child nodes to their parents to build downward routes. A malicious insider node can exploit this feature to send fake DAOs to its parents periodically, triggering those parents, in turn, to forward the fake messages upward to the root node. In this letter, we show how this behavior can have a detrimental side effect on the performance of the network, increasing power consumption, latency, and reducing reliability. To address this problem, a new scheme is introduced to mitigate significantly the effect of the DAO attack on network performance.