Resilient against spoofing in 6LoWPAN networks by temporary-private IPv6 addresses

Abstract

An attacker can disrupt the network operations in the 6LoWPANs by spoofing the IPv6 address while evading the detection. Despite many existing spoofing prevention techniques, spoofing threat still persists. Thus, it becomes necessary to devise a method which can offer resilience against spoofing by reducing the attack disruption time. This study aims at reducing IPv6 spoofing attack disruption time in 6LoWPANs. Hence, it provides the resiliency against IPv6 spoofing threat. The time complexity analysis of the attack tree for the spoofing attack is performed to analyze the attack disruption time. The analytical results show that attack disruption window is directly proportional to the lifetime of the node addresses. The lower lifetime of node addresses ensure the reduction of the attack disruption window. Thus, the use of temporary node addresses can be a solution for reducing the spoofing attack disruption window. Node’s IPv6 address can be changed periodically to dissociate a node from its permanent identity. Hence, an attacker has to re-perform the attack to gain significant benefits. Corrupted routing table as a result of spoofing attack and its countermeasure is simulated in Cooja running Contiki operating system. The length of the attack window depends upon the periodicity of the address change. The higher frequency of address change decreases the attack disruption time with an increase in the communication cost. Simulations have been performed to compare the optimum value of address change periodicity concerning the communication cost for two private addressing schemes proposed in the literature.