Design and Analysis of Probing Route to Defense Sink-Hole Attacks for Internet of Things Security

Internet of Things (IoT) applications have been growing significantly in recent years, however, the security issue has not been well studied in the literature for the IoT ecosystem. The sinkhole attack is one of serious destructive attacks for IoT as it is easy to launch the attack and difficult to defend it. In this paper, a Probe Route based Defense Sinkhole Attack (PRDSA) scheme is proposed to resist Sinkhole attack and guarantee security for IoT, which is the first work that can detect, bypass and locate the sinkhole at the same time. The PRDSA scheme proposes a routing mechanism combining the far-sink reverse routing, equal-hop routing, and minimum hop routing, which can effectively circumvent the sinkhole attacks and find a safe route to the real sink, so that the scheme can achieve better sinkhole detection. More importantly, the PRDSA scheme overcomes the limitation of previous schemes that they cannot locate the sinkhole. During the detection of the sinkhole attack, the PRDSA scheme requires the nodes and the sink node to return the signature of the information (e.g., IDs, etc.), so that the location of the sinkhole can be determined. Furthermore, the PRDAS scheme mainly utilizes the characteristics of network energy consumption. The probe route of sinkhole attack mainly occurs in the region where the remaining energy exists. Thus, the PRDSA scheme has little impact on the network lifetime. Theory and experiments show that this scheme can achieve better performance than existing schemes in term of network security and lifetime.