A Lightweight Improvement of PeDAAC Protocol for 6LoWPAN in the Internet of Things

Abstract

The transfer of IPv6 packets over the low-power personal area network (6LoWPAN) using IPv6 routing protocol enables small devices with limited processing power to transmit wirelessly. Privacy enabled disjoint and dynamic address auto-configuration (PeDAAC) is one of the 6LoWPAN protocols designed to ensure the privacy of the nodes by changing IPv6 and MAC addresses. One of the main purposes of this protocol is to keep the identity of the sender and receiver secret, so it can have different applications, such as hiding the identity of patients in the hospital or military applications to send data anonymously. PeDAAC is a dynamic protocol whose purpose is to create a conflict-free, auto-configuring IPv6 addressing scheme, eliminating the need for duplicate address detection. It results in lower latency and optimal communication costs, and the IPV6 addresses of each node will be unique. Two successful attacks on the PeDAAC protocol are discussed in this paper. An adversary can attack the availability of the nodes and can cause a denial of service attack. Also, by detecting the node’s identity, changes over time can gather more messages, which increases the likelihood of successful eavesdropping. The greatest common divisor-based lightweight improvement (GCDLi) is a proposed lightweight extension of this paper to PeDAAC protocol to protect against these attacks. Beyond that, it counteracts two types of security threats: eavesdropping and denial of service attack. The proposed extension of the protocol improves the privacy and anonymity of the nodes. The time complexity of the proposed method is $$ \theta \left(\log n\right) $$, and due to the limited range of input values (maximum 16 bit), it is considered a lightweight improvement.