RAD‐EI: A routing attack detection scheme for edge‐based Internet of Things environment

Summary Internet of Things (IoT) offers various types of application services in different domains, such as “smart infrastructure, health‐care, critical infrastructure, and intelligent transportation system.” The name edge computing signifies a corner or edge in a network at which traffic enters or exits from the network. In edge computing, the data analysis task happens very close to the IoT smart sensors and devices. Edge computing can also speed up the analysis process, which allows decision makers to take action within a short duration of time. However, edge‐based IoT environment has several security and privacy issues similar to those for the cloud‐based IoT environment. Various types of attacks, such as “replay, man‐in‐the middle, impersonation, password guessing, routing attack, and other denial of service attacks” may be possible in edge‐based IoT environment. The routing attacker nodes have the capability to deviate and disrupt the normal flow of traffic. These malicious nodes do not send packets (messages) to the edge node and only send packets to its neighbor collaborator attacker nodes. Therefore, in the presence of such kind of routing attack, edge node does not get the information or sometimes it gets the partial information. This further affects the overall performance of communication of edge‐based IoT environment. In the presence of such an attack, the “throughput of the network” decreases, “end‐to‐end delay” increases, “packet delivery ratio” decreases, and other parameters also get affected. Consequently, it is important to provide solution for such kind of attack. In this paper, we design an intrusion detection scheme for the detection of routing attack in edge‐based IoT environment called as RAD‐EI. We simulate RAD‐EI using the widely used “NS2 simulator” to measure different network parameters. Furthermore, we provide the security analysis of RAD‐EI to prove its resilience against routing attacks. RAD‐EI accomplishes around 95.0 % “detection rate” and 1.23 % “false positive rate” that are notably better than other related existing schemes. In addition, RAD‐EI is efficient in terms of computation and communication costs. As a result, RAD‐EI is a good match for some critical and sensitive applications, such as smart security and surveillance system.