Belkheir, MohammedRouissat, MehdiBelkhira, Hicham Sid Ahmed2025-04-212025-04-212021http://dspace.univ-oeb.dz:4000/handle/123456789/21947In the recent few years, the cybersecurity challenge stood out to the research community with the drastic evolution of IoT networks. The present article deals with the version number attack, a major security concern for IoT networks using RPL as routing protocol. Although a number of techniques have been proposed to mitigate this kind of attack, the main challenge of the proposed technique remains to contemplate the limited capabilities of the embedded devices composing the network in terms of computing, storage and energy. This makes decentralized heavy algorithms and cryptographic solutions not suitable to cope with the inherited resources of nodes and the network core routing operations. The main purpose of our present work is to implement a new lightweight approach aiming to reduce the destructive effect of the version number attack, whereby the node takes into consideration only the version number received from its preferred parent and ignores other versions of its neighborhood. This leads to propagate the same version number value of the root node over the entire network and ensures the network integrity, by reducing the repeated global repair process caused by falsified values of the version number. The proposed method is implemented under Contiki 3.0 operating system and simulations are performed using COOJA for different scenarios while changing the intruder node position in the network. The obtained results obviously depict that our proposed method yields better aftermath, where the energy saving is between 10% and 50%, depending on the intruder position, while the control overhead is between 2% and 50%.enIoT; RPL; DODAG; Version number; DIO; COOJAArticle