• 6TiSCH
• 6top
• IEEE 802.15.4
• Industrial Internet of Things
• Security

Novel wireless technologies are enabling the adoption of wireless solutions for the industrial environment, moving toward the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) paradigm. Industrial applications such as industrial control and remote supervision systems, composed by sensors, actuators and field devices, have stringent requirements in terms of communication reliability, security and timeliness. In order to fulfill this requirements and foster the integration of industrial applications into the IPv6 infrastructure, the IETF IPv6 over the TSCH mode of IEEE802.15.4 (6TiSCH) Working Group is currently defining the 6TiSCH architecture to enable industrial-grade IPv6 networks. Although many different aspects of the architecture have been investigated in literature, i.e., communication resource management, routing strategies definition, an in-depth analysis of the security features included in its design is still missing. In this thesis the security vulnerabilities of the 6top protocol (6P), defined in the 6TiSCH Operation Sublayer for the negotiation of communication resources, are assessed. Firstly, two possible attacks that can impair network performance are defined. Then both of them are implemented on the Contiki-NG Operating System to test their feasibility and asses their impact on a simple deployment with three Zolertia RE-Mote sensor nodes. Finally, since the preliminary analysis showed that both attacks can significantly reduce network performance, a set of simulations using Cooja were carried out, in order to assess the impact of the attacks on larger networks. The results show that both attacks reduce reliability in the overall network and increase energy consumption of the network nodes.