Security in low power wireless networks : Evaluating and mitigating routing attacks in a reactive, on demand ad-hoc routing protocol

Abstract: Using low energy devices to communicate over the air presents many challenges to reach security as resources in the world of Internet Of Things (IoT) are limited. Any extra overhead of computing or radio transmissions that extra security might add affects cost of both increased computing time and energy consumption which are all scarce resources in IoT. This thesis details the current state of security mechanisms built into the commercially available protocol stacks Zigbee, Z-wave, and Bluetooth Low Energy, and collects implemented and proposed solutions to common ways of attacking systems built on these protocol stacks. Attacks evaluated are denial of service/sleep, man-in-the-middle, replay, eavesdropping, and in mesh networks, sinkhole, black hole, selective forwarding, sybil, wormhole, and hello flood. An intrusion detection system is proposed to detect sinkhole, selective forwarding, and sybil attacks in the routing protocol present in the communication stack Rime implemented in the operating system Contiki. The Sinkhole and Selective forwarding mitigation works close to perfection in larger lossless networks but suffers an increase in false positives in lossy environments. The Sybil Detection is based on Received Signal Strength and strengthens the blacklist used in the sinkhole and selective forwarding detection, as a node changing its ID to avoid the blacklist will be detected as in the same geographical position as the blacklisted node.