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An efficient and reliable mechanism for Wormhole detection in RPL based IoT networks
Hassan, Jawad Raza, Muhammad Yousaf Ali Sohail, Adnan Asim, Muhammad
Hassan, Jawad
Raza, Muhammad Yousaf Ali
Sohail, Adnan
Asim, Muhammad
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Epub Date
Issue Date
2026-01-05
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Accepted manuscript of a journal article, under embargo until Jan 2027
Adobe PDF, 1.52 MB
- Embargoed until 2027-01-05
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Abstract
The Internet of Things (IoT) relies heavily on the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) to support large scale, resource constrained deployments. However, RPL faces major research challenges, including its susceptibility to routing attacks, limited support for mutual authentication, and dynamic topology variations. In addition, the inefficiency of traditional heavy-weight cryptographic mechanisms, though provide secure communication but remain ineffective against insider routing attacks. These weaknesses allow adversaries to exploit routing control messages, leading to attacks such as Wormhole, Rank, and DAO Inconsistency. Among these, Wormhole attacks are particularly severe because they exploit colluding nodes to create deceptive low latency tunnels, misleading neighboring nodes, and disrupting the overall routing topology. Motivated by these challenges, this paper presents Efficient and Reliable Wormhole detection for IoT (AKA ERW-IoT), a lightweight path validation mechanism that ensures routing integrity with minimal overhead. Simulation results show that ERW-IoT improves the average packet delivery ratio by 5.5%, reduces energy consumption by 0.986%, optimizes memory utilization by nearly 1%, and achieves a 100% detection rate, demonstrating its practicality and effectiveness in securing RPL based IoT networks.
Citation
Hassan, J., Raza, M. Y. A., Shohail, A., Asim, M. & Pervez, Z. (2026) An efficient and reliable mechanism for Wormhole detection in RPL based IoT networks, Computer Networks, 276, Article Number 111968
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Type
Journal article
Language
en
Description
This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by Elsevier in Computer Networks on 05/01/2026, available online: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.comnet.2025.111968
The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.
Series/Report no.
ISSN
1389-1286
EISSN
1872-7069