A Lightweight Intrusion Detection for Sybil Attack Under Mobile RPL in the Internet of Things

The routing protocol for low-power and lossy networks (RPLs) is a standard routing protocol for resource-constrained devices in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks. Primarily, RPL can support a dynamic range of mobility among the nodes in the network, which becomes a great demand now for real-time applications. At the same time, RPL is much vulnerable to various security attacks because of its resource-constrained nature. Such security attacks might cause severe threats and destructive behavior inside the network. In this article, we primarily focus on the Sybil attack, where an attacker claims multiple illegitimate identities either by fabricating or compromising the nodes. Also, in this type of attack, a single adversary is required to control multiple legitimate nodes in the network, and thereby, the adversary node saves the physical resources. In this article, we propose a novel artificial bee colony (ABC)-inspired mobile Sybil attack modeling and lightweight intrusion detection algorithm for the Sybil attack in mobile RPL. Moreover, we considered three different categories of Sybil attack based on its behavior, and we analyze the performance of the RPL under the Sybil attack in terms of packet delivery ratio, control traffic overhead, and energy consumption. Also, we examine the performance of the proposed algorithm in terms of accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity.