SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2102.06254

Securing RPL using Network Coding: The Chained Secure Mode (CSM)

Abstract

As the de facto routing protocol for many Internet of Things (IoT) networks nowadays, and to assure the confidentiality and integrity of its control messages, the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) incorporates three modes of security: the Unsecured Mode (UM), Preinstalled Secure Mode (PSM), and the Authenticated Secure Mode (ASM). While the PSM and ASM are intended to protect against external routing attacks and some replay attacks (through an optional replay protection mechanism), recent research showed that RPL in PSM is still vulnerable to many routing attacks, both internal and external. In this paper, we propose a novel secure mode for RPL, the Chained Secure Mode (CSM), based on the concept of intraflow Network Coding (NC). The CSM is designed to enhance RPL resilience and mitigation capability against replay attacks while allowing the integration with external security measures such as Intrusion Detection Systems (IDSs). The security and performance of the proposed CSM were evaluated and compared against RPL in UM and PSM (with and without the optional replay protection) under several routing attacks: the Neighbor attack (NA), Wormhole (WH), and CloneID attack (CA), using average packet delivery rate (PDR), End-to-End (E2E) latency, and power consumption as metrics. It showed that CSM has better performance and more enhanced security than both the UM and PSM with the replay protection, while mitigating both the NA and WH attacks and significantly reducing the effect of the CA in the investigated scenarios.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Ahmed Raoof, Chung-Horng Lung, Ashraf Matrawy. 2021-02-11. Securing RPL using Network Coding: The Chained Secure Mode (CSM). https://doi.org/10.1109/jiot.2021.3109109

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Message-Level Scheduling for RLNC-Coded Multi-Source Traffic

This paper studies weighted decoding-delay minimization for multiple RLNC-coded message streams that compete for finite processing capacity at a destination. Packet arrivals are exogenous, while the scheduler only determines the processing order of packets already available at the destination. A trace-conditioned offline scheduling formulation shows that a batch-release subclass is strongly NP-hard even with a single processing unit. Message-Aware Innovation-Deficit Scheduling (MAIDS) is then developed to prioritize each serviceable message according to its weight and remaining decoding deficit. For a single processing unit, MAIDS is shown to be exactly optimal under nonblocking progressive arrivals with equal weights and under common activation with arbitrary positive weights, while the unrestricted weighted online problem admits no universal deterministic $O(1)$ competitive ratio. Simulation results on streaming and batch benchmarks show that MAIDS consistently reduces weighted decoding delay relative to the tested baselines, remains close to the offline optimum on average, and recovers the predicted exact performance boundaries.

cs.NI

The Towers Were Standing: A Cause Decomposition of Cellular Outages During Hurricane Helene

Hurricane Helene produced the largest absolute cell-site outage in the public FCC record, peaking at 4562 sites. The conventional model is physical: towers destroyed. Helene did destroy over 1700 miles of fibre, but almost none of it was cell sites. We present the first cause-decomposed study of the FCC's Disaster Information Reporting System, reconstructing 80 state-days and 580 county-days from 24 daily filings by two reconciled independent extractions. Damage to cell sites is negligible: 1.1% of attributed cell-site-days across six states, at most 3.8% anywhere. The sites were standing. What took them out divides by terrain: pooled, power dominates at 63.2%, but in mountainous North Carolina severed transport (backhaul) reaches 52.2% against 47.3%, and in Tennessee 69.9%. North Carolina's transport share rises from 7.0% to 85.0% across the event (\r{ho} = 0.92). Seventeen days after landfall, on 15 October, 47 sites lost transport across six contiguous North Carolina counties with no rainfall, no power loss, no damage, and recovery by the next report. Independent active-probe measurement corroborates it: responsive /24s fall 1.02% for twelve hours while Tennessee stays flat. We release the dataset. Backup power is the standard resilience investment; here it addresses the smaller half of the problem.

cs.NI

terms.txt: A Consent and Compensation Protocol for Agentic Web Access

The open web ran on an unwritten bargain: sites admitted crawlers, and search engines sent visitors back. Public measurements show that bargain breaking under AI crawlers and agents. Automated clients now make up most requests, training dominates Cloudflare-classified crawling, and the largest AI platforms fetch thousands of pages for each visitor they return. The web's common control, robots.txt, cannot express identity, purpose, terms, or price, can be circumvented, and newer alternatives are largely proprietary CDN features. We specify terms.txt, a robots.txt-style file for per-path, per-purpose machine-access terms, plus an origin-enforced exchange using Web Bot Auth signatures, signed intent, delegation tokens, HTTP 402 negotiation, and signed receipts. We define what the exchange can enforce, audit, and leave to contract. A dependency-free implementation adds 0.20 to 0.65 ms per request on one vCPU.

cs.NI