A Comparative Analysis of Decreased Rank Attack in RPL-Based IoT Network

Abstract

The Routing Protocol for Low-Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) is fundamental to Internet of Things (IoT) communication but remains vulnerable to rank-based attacks. This paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the decreased rank attack, where a malicious node illegitimately advertises a lower rank value to attract network traffic and become a preferred parent for neighboring nodes. Using the Cooja simulator with 12 IoT motes, we evaluate two scenarios: a reference scenario with all legitimate nodes and an attack scenario where node 12 is configured as a malicious node performing a decreased rank attack. Simulation results demonstrate that the attack causes 100% of legitimate nodes to reroute traffic through the malicious node, increases average hop distance from 1.42 to 2.00 (40.8% increase), and concentrates all upstream traffic through a single point of failure. Furthermore, energy consumption analysis reveals that the attacker node experiences a 160% increase in energy consumption due to handling 11x more traffic. The attack creates distinctive signatures in parent distribution, path affinity, hop count, and topology centralization. These findings highlight critical vulnerabilities in RPL’s rank-based parent selection mechanism and emphasize the need for rank verification protocols and intrusion detection systems for resourceconstrained IoT environments.