  As the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) became the
standard for routing in the Internet of Things (IoT) networks, many researchers
had investigated the security aspects of this protocol. However, no work (to
the best of our knowledge) has investigated the use of the security mechanisms
included in the protocol standard, due to the fact that there was no
implementation for these features in any IoT operating system yet. A partial
implementation of RPL security mechanisms was presented recently for Contiki
operating system (by Perazzo et al.), which provided us with the opportunity to
examine RPL security mechanisms. In this paper, we investigate the effects and
challenges of using RPL security mechanisms under common routing attacks.
First, a comparison of RPL performance, with and without its security
mechanisms, under three routing attacks (Blackhole, Selective- Forward, and
Neighbor attacks) is conducted using several metrics (e.g., average data packet
delivery rate, average data packet delay, average power consumption... etc.)
Based on the observations from this comparison, we came with few suggestions
that could reduce the effects of such attacks, without having added security
mechanisms for RPL.
