Effect of DIS Attack on 6TiSCH Network Formation

The 6TiSCH standard provides minimum latency and reliability in mission-critical IoT applications. To optimize resource allocation during 6TiSCH network formation, IETF released the 6TiSCH minimal configuration (6TiSCH-MC) standard. 6TiSCH-MC considered IETF’s IPv6 Routing Protocol for Low power and Lossy network (RPL) as a routing protocol for both upward and downward routing. In RPL, new joining nodes or joined nodes transmit DODAG Information Solicitation (DIS) requests to get routing information from the network. However, we observe that malicious node(s) can severely affect 6TiSCH networks by sending multiple DIS requests. In this paper, we show and experimentally evaluate on real devices the impact of the DIS attack during 6TiSCH networks formation. We show that the attacker does not need expensive resources or access to the network’s sensitive information to execute the DIS attack. Our testbed experiments show that the DIS attack significantly degrades the nodes’ joining time and energy consumption, increasing them by 34% and 16%, respectively, compared to normal functioning during 6TiSCH network formation.