Security Risk Analysis of LoRaWAN and Future Directions

Ismail Butun, Nuno Pereira and Mikael Gidlund
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Ismail Butun: Information Systems and Technology, Mid Sweden University, 851 70 Sundsvall, Sweden
Nuno Pereira: School of Engineering (DEI/ISEP), Polytechnic of Porto (IPP), 4200-072 Porto, Portugal
Mikael Gidlund: Information Systems and Technology, Mid Sweden University, 851 70 Sundsvall, Sweden

Future Internet, 2018, vol. 11, issue 1, 1-22

Abstract: LoRa (along with its upper layers definition—LoRaWAN) is one of the most promising Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technologies for implementing Internet of Things (IoT)-based applications. Although being a popular technology, several works in the literature have revealed vulnerabilities and risks regarding the security of LoRaWAN v1.0 (the official 1st specification draft). The LoRa-Alliance has built upon these findings and introduced several improvements in the security and architecture of LoRa. The result of these efforts resulted in LoRaWAN v1.1, released on 11 October 2017. This work aims at reviewing and clarifying the security aspects of LoRaWAN v1.1. By following ETSI guidelines, we provide a comprehensive Security Risk Analysis of the protocol and discuss several remedies to the security risks described. A threat catalog is presented, along with discussions and analysis in view of the scale, impact, and likelihood of each threat. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this work is one of the first of its kind, by providing a detailed security risk analysis related to the latest version of LoRaWAN. Our analysis highlights important practical threats, such as end-device physical capture, rogue gateway and self-replay, which require particular attention by developers and organizations implementing LoRa networks.

Keywords: internet of things; sensor node; LPWAN; attacks; threats; vulnerabilities; IoT; analysis; risk; assessment; low power; LoRa; v1.1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O3 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2018
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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