Optimized Duplicate Address Detection for the Prevention of Denial-of-Service Attacks in IPv6 Network

Abstract

In constrained IoT networks, Stateless Address Autoconfiguration (SLAAC) utilizes the Duplicate Address Detection (DAD) protocol to ensure the uniqueness of IPv6 addresses. However, the DAD employed in SLAAC is susceptible to various security vulnerabilities, including issues related to confidentiality, conflicting addresses, and spoofing attacks. Malicious nodes can exploit these weaknesses to perform Denial of Service (DoS) attacks by consistently claiming a tentative address, joining with conflicting address, or disclosing assigned address. Existing measures against DAD attacks have limitations, e.g. high computation, communication overhead, energy consumption, and major protocol modification. To address these challenges, this paper presents an innovative Optimized DAD (O-DAD) that is robust, scalable, and compliant with standard specifications. In O-DAD, the uniqueness of tentative IPv6 addresses is ensured in a way that neither new nor existing nodes have knowledge of each other's exact assigned addresses. O-DAD also hampers the ability of malicious nodes to spoof new/existing nodes. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution effectively mitigates these attacks and exhibits superior performance in terms of Address Success Ratio (ASR), computational complexity, overhead, and energy consumption. When compared to Secure, Improved, and Standard DAD, the proposed scheme reduces overhead and energy by approximately 6%, 8%, and 15%, respectively.

KEYWORDS:

• IoT
• DAD
• Stateless IPv6 addressing
• Assigned address
• Tentative address

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

DATA AVAILABILITY

Associated data will be provided by corresponding author on the request of a reasonable ground.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pragya

Pragya is a PhD research scholar at NSUT, Delhi, India. She did her B Tech from K.N.I.T. Sultanpur and ME from NITTTR, Chandigarh, India. Currently Her research interests are IoT and adhoc networks.

Bijendra Kumar

Bijendra Kumar did his BE from H.B.T.I. Kanpur, India. He has done his PhD from Delhi University, Delhi, India in 2011. Presently he is working as professor and head in computer science and engineering division, NSUT, Delhi, India. His area of research interests are IoT,WSN, design of algorithms and cryptography. Email: [email protected]

Gyanendra Kumar

Gyanendra Kumar received his BTech degree in computer engineering and information technology from Uttar Pradesh Technical University, Lucknow in 2004, MTech Degree in information technology from J.C. Bose University of Science and Technology, YMCA, Faridabad, Haryana, in 2011, and PhD degree in computer engineering from the J.C. Bose University of Science and Technology, YMCA, Faridabad, Haryana, in 2023. He works with Manipal University Jaipur, Jaipur, Rajasthan, as an assistant professor. His academic experience is about 17 years as a faculty in different engineering colleges and Universities. He has published many research papers in various reputed journals and conferences. He has also worked as a reviewer for Elsevier, Springer, MDPI, Tech Science Press, etc. He has served as an invited speaker, session chair, and track chair at different international conferences. He is a professional member of IEEE and ACM. His research interests include Ad-hoc networks, internet of things, network communication, physical/cyber security, AI, and machine learning. Email: [email protected]