A Gaming and Trust-Model-Based Countermeasure for DIS Attack on 6TiSCH IoT Networks

The 6TiSCH communication architecture provides delay-bounded packet delivery, energy efficient, and reliable data-delivering communication in mission-critical Internet of Things (IoT) applications. It uses IETF’s 6TiSCH minimal configuration (6TiSCH-MC) standard for resource allocation during network formation and routing using a routing protocol for low power and lossy network (RPL) as routing protocol. In RPL, the DODAG information solicitation (DIS) control packet is used to solicit routing information from the existing networks. However, it is observed that malicious transmission of this DIS packet can severely affect the 6TiSCH networks in terms of nodes’ network joining time and energy consumption. Therefore, designing countermeasures of DIS attack in 6TiSCH network has become critically important. Additionally, the existing works neither considered all the possible parameters together for detecting DIS attack nor energy efficient, and create control packet overhead. In this work, we model noncooperative gaming to determine the optimal probability of responding to a DIS packet. Subsequently, we design a trust model to detect malicious DIS transmission in 6TiSCH networks. Finally, we merge both the proposed gaming model and trust model to propose a scheme—gaming and trust-based countermeasure (GTCM) to reduce the effect of DIS attack in 6TiSCH networks. We implement the GTCM on Contiki-NG and validate it using open source FIT IoT-LAB testbed. Our experimental testbed results show that GTCM reduces the effect of DIS attack in terms of pledges’ (new nodes) joining time and energy consumption significantly.