Brief Announcement: Providing End-to-End Secure Communication in Low-Power Wide Area Networks

Abstract

Recent technologies for low-rate, long-range transmission in unlicensed sub-GHz frequency bands enables the realization of Long-range Wide Area Network. Despite the rapid uptake of LPWANs, security concerns arising from the open architecture and usage of the unlicensed band are also growing. While the current LPWAN deployments include basic techniques to deal with end-to-end encryption there are specific security issues that arise due to the overall architecture and protocol layer design. In this paper, a new scheme to establish end-to-end secure communication in long-range IoT deployments is introduced. The advantages over the existing approaches and architectural design are presented in the context of typical smart cities application scenarios.

A Smart Water Metering Deployment Based on the Fog Computing Paradigm

“…Important future work is to examine the levels of cyber-security and cyber-protection achieved. As a system composed of different smart devices, with data processing carried out at remotely located micro-data centres, guaranteeing the overall security of the system is a challenge [62,103,104]. Towards this direction, we need to develop efficient methods and technologies to benchmark the smart water micro-components' protection efficiency.…”

A Survey on the Security of Low Power Wide Area Networks: Threats, Challenges, and Potential Solutions

“…The technology is specifically designed for long range communications (up to 50 km depending on the LPWAN device) [ 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ]. LPWAN technologies are distinguished from other connectivity technologies as they have outstanding features which include low power consumption, low cost, bit rate, capacity and mobility [ 20 ]. Furthermore, they provide battery-efficient possibility targeting 10+ battery life, universal wide-area connectivity thereby allowing numerous M2M and IoT applications unlike popular short-range network devices such as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and ZigBee [ 36 ].…”

“…The security protocol was developed to support mutual authentication, secret key exchange, perfect forward secrecy, and end-to-end security between node devices. Similarly, to establish a secured end to end LPWAN communication, the authors in [ 20 ] proposed a replay attack mitigation scheme involving two different AES keys. The authors used a frame counter which involves two different 128-bit AES session keys for upstream and downstream messages exchange, respectively, for the blockage of repeated transmission of packets.…”

“…The use of symmetric encryption is not secured as it uses single key to execute encryption process. Although some LPWAN standards use asymmetric encryption like RSA and strong encryption methods such as AES, better and faster encryption methods for LPWAN should be core interest of future research works [ 20 ].…”

“…The threats, effects and impacts of LPWAN security menaces have been extensively discussed in numerous studies [ 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 ]. To mitigate the growing IoT and LPWAN security challenges, numerous security solutions such as intrusion detection systems (IDSs), key management and encryption schemes have been proposed in the literature [ 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ]. Despite the satisfactory performances demonstrated, some of the various schemes and upgrades from the standard producers have struggled in addressing the emerging security requirements of the IoT operational environment, e.g., despite LoRaWAN’s specification that laid emphasis on key management protocol whereby a compromised key from an end node should not create a major problem for other nodes, experiences have shown that key management issues is still a major problem with regards to the standard.…”