Selective Jamming of LoRaWAN using Commodity Hardware

Long range, low power networks are rapidly gaining acceptance in the Internet of Things (IoT) due to their ability to economically support long-range sensing and control applications while providing multi-year battery life. LoRa is a key example of this new class of network and is being deployed at large scale in several countries worldwide. As these networks move out of the lab and into the real world, they expose a large cyber-physical attack surface. Securing these networks is therefore both critical and urgent. This paper highlights security issues in LoRa and LoRaWAN that arise due to the choice of a robust but slow modulation type in the protocol. We exploit these issues to develop a suite of practical attacks based around selective jamming. These attacks are conducted and evaluated using commodity hardware. The paper concludes by suggesting a range of countermeasures that can be used to mitigate the attacks.Comment: Mobiquitous 2017, November 7-10, 2017, Melbourne, VIC, Australi

A Viable LoRa Framework for Smart Cities

This research is intended to provide practical insights to empower designers, developers and management to develop smart cities underpinned by Long Range (LoRa) technology. LoRa, one of most prevalent long-range wireless communication technologies, can be used to underpin the development of smart cities. This study draws upon relevant research to gain an understanding of underlying principles and issues involved in the design and management of long-range and low-power networks such as LoRa. This research uses empirical evidence that has been gathered through experiments with a LoRa network to analyse network design and identify challenges and then proposes cost-effective and timely solutions. Particularly, practical measurements of LoRa network dependencies and performance metrics are used to support our proposals. This research identifies a number of network performance metrics that need to be considered and controlled when designing and managing LoRa- specific networks from the perspectives of hardware, software, networking and security

Optimal deployment of mobile gateways in LoRaWAN environments

The recent growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) has given rise to new applications and technologies. Of these technologies, LoRa is the one that has stood out recently due to its ability to transmit packets over long distances at low energy costs. In addition to this, this technology also uses unlicensed frequency bands, and all these factors make it possible to build low energy cost networks with large coverage areas at low monetary cost. This makes LoRa very appealing for environments where multiple square kilometers need to be covered for monitoring, such as agriculture. This thesis focuses primarily on positioning gateways in a Lo- RaWAN in order to achieve energy fairness in the network.The target in question is an environmental sensor network that monitors conditions inside tree canopies in an orange orchard in the Algarve, south of Portugal.The peculiar characteristics of these orange trees, with heights up to 3.5 m and very dense foliage, makes it a very challenging environment for radio waves propagation and causes a rapid drop in signal quality. The power consumption of the end-nodes of the network is defined by 7 combinations of spreading factor and bandwidth (0 to 6) where 0 represents the slowest and most reliable transmission at the cost of higher power consumption while 6 represents the opposite. The combination of bandwidth and spreading factor is denominated data rate. Environmental factors can negatively impact the quality of LoRa packets and the necessary power adjustments of the end-node to overcome this, and increase signal reliability, can easily define whether a device is able to transmit for 1 year or 10! The main factors that can affect signal quality are obstruction, distance and meteorology. In the case study, of these 3 factors, obstruction affects transmission quality the most. Most of the literature suggests solutions within the framework of optimizing the datarate optimization algorithm (ADR). ADR aims to minimize energy consumption while ensuring the best possible packet transmission rate and achieves this by changing the data rate based on the quality of the last 20 packets received.However, this optimization is done directly to individual end-nodes and does not solve the problem of energy fairness over the whole network because, regardless of how optimized this algorithm is, the algorithm cannot transcend the physical constraints imposed by the devices and the technology itself. Distance and obstruction will always be obstacles to signal quality. Since these physical constraints will always be present in a network and the solutions proposed by the literature only improve performance at the level of individual devices, this ends up creating a large lifetime discrepancy between devices depending on their placement. In the case of LHT65s, the discrepancy in device life expectancy is high. For example the difference between using a data rate of 0 or 5 is about 10 years. The solution proposed in this thesis to overcome this problem is to precompute the optimal position for the gateways in order to guarantee the highest life expectancy for the network. Given a number of available positions for the gateways and having a certain number of gateways less than the number of positions, the goal is to compute the optimal positioning of the gateways in order to maximize the overall network life expectancy by ensuring a fair energy consumption among different end-nodes. The first step in this process was to collect information about signal quality from a real case LoRaWAN deployment. This allowed to better understand the constraints and problems associated with its implementation. This was done using 25 LTH65 devices, 1 RAK 7244 gateway and Chirpstack as the framework to manage the network. Regarding the study of the algorithm before applying it to the practical case, a simulator was used to collect data. The simulator chosen for the development of the application was OMNet++, which besides being easier to use is also better documented than the other options considered. This simulator also offers a graphical interface with great detail that allows you to easily observe the behavior of the network. Using the Flora module it was simulated a LoRaWAN network with the structure suggested by the LoRa Alliance® with 25 devices using Oulu’s path loss model. The information obtained from this simulation was used as input and test for the algorithm that was compiled by CPLEX. In each simulation about 10,000 packets were sent per device and each experiment was repeated 30 times. The results show that the optimization model has the ability to identify the best placement for the gateway given a predefined locations and network geometry. This is due to the fact that the algorithm identifies the lowest value in the highest energy consumption per packet, and minimizing this value creates a balance of consumption among the devices and consequently extends the life expectancy of the network. It can then be concluded that this methodology is indeed efficient for deployments where changing network devices cannot be done frequently. Although it is not easy to relocate gateways in already implemented networks, but in new environments where monitoring and optimization are requirements, and these new environments are built considering the network structure, we can use this methodology since it has proven to be able to improve network life expectancy.O recente crescimento da Internet das Coisas (IoT) deu origem a novas aplicac¸ ˜oes e tecnologias. Destas tecnologias, a LoRa ´e a que se tem destacado recentemente devido `a sua capacidade de transmitir pacotes a longas distˆancias a baixos custos energ´eticos. Al´em disso, esta tecnologia tamb´em utiliza bandas de frequˆencia n˜ao licenciadas, e todos estes factores tornam poss´ıvel a construc¸ ˜ao de redes de baixo custo energ´etico com grandes ´areas de cobertura a baixo custo monet´ario. Isto torna LoRa muito apelativo para ambientes onde v´arios quil´ometros quadrados precisam de ser cobertos para monitorizac¸ ˜ao, tais como a agricultura. Esta tese centra-se principalmente no posicionamento de gateways numa rede LoRaWAN, a fim de alcançar a energy fairness na rede.(...)This work was supported by FCT (Foundation for Science and Technology) from Portugal within CEOT (Center for Electronic, Optoelectronic and Telecommunications) and UID/MULTI/00631/2020 project

Systematic literature survey: applications of LoRa communication

LoRa is a communication scheme that is part of the low power wide are network (LPWAN) technology using ISM bands. It has seen extensive documentation and use in research and industry due to its long coverage ranges of up-to 20Km or more with less than 14dB transmit power. Moreover, some applications report theoretical battery lives of upto 10years for field deployed modules utilising the scheme in WSN applications. Additionally, the scheme is very resilient to losses from noise, as well bursts of interference through its FEC. Our objective is to systematically review the empirical evidence of the use-cases of LoRa in rural landscapes, metrics and the relevant validation schemes. In addition the research is evaluated based on (i) mathematical function of the scheme (bandwidth use, spreading factor, symbol rate, chip rate and nominal bit rate) (ii) use-cases (iii) test-beds, metrics of evaluation and (iv) validation methods. A systematic literature review of published, refereed primary studies on LoRa applications was conducted. Using articles from 2010-2019. We identified 21 relevant primary studies. These reported a range of different assessments of LoRa. 10 out of 21 reported on novel use cases. As an actionable conclusion, the authors conclude that more work is needed in terms of field testing, as no articles could be found on performance/deployment in Botswana or South Africa despite the existence of LoRa networks in both countries. Thus researchers in the region can research propagation models performance, energy efficiency of the scheme and MAC layer as well as the channel access challenges for the region

Deployment and Implementation Aspects of Radio Frequency Fingerprinting in Cybersecurity of Smart Grids

Smart grids incorporate diverse power equipment used for energy optimization in intelligent cities. This equipment may use Internet of Things (IoT) devices and services in the future. To ensure stable operation of smart grids, cybersecurity of IoT is paramount. To this end, use of cryptographic security methods is prevalent in existing IoT. Non-cryptographic methods such as radio frequency fingerprinting (RFF) have been on the horizon for a few decades but are limited to academic research or military interest. RFF is a physical layer security feature that leverages hardware impairments in radios of IoT devices for classification and rogue device detection. The article discusses the potential of RFF in wireless communication of IoT devices to augment the cybersecurity of smart grids. The characteristics of a deep learning (DL)-aided RFF system are presented. Subsequently, a deployment framework of RFF for smart grids is presented with implementation and regulatory aspects. The article culminates with a discussion of existing challenges and potential research directions for maturation of RFF.publishedVersio

Distributed scheduling algorithms for LoRa-based wide area cyber-physical systems

Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) are a class of wireless communication protocols that work over long distances, consume low power and support low datarates. LPWANs have been designed for monitoring applications, with sparse communication from nodes to servers and sparser from servers to nodes. Inspite of their initial design, LPWANs have the potential to target applications with higher and stricter requirements like those of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Due to their long-range capabilities, LPWANs can specifically target CPS applications distributed over a wide-area, which is referred to as Wide-Area CPS (WA-CPS). Augmenting WA-CPSs with wireless communication would allow for more flexible, low-cost and easily maintainable deployment. However, wireless communications come with problems like reduced reliability and unpredictable latencies, making them harder to use for CPSs. With this intention, this thesis explores the use of LPWANs, specifically LoRa, to meet the communication and control requirements of WA-CPSs. The thesis focuses on using LoRa due to its high resilience to noise, several communication parameters to choose from and a freely modifiable communication stack and servers making it ideal for research and deployment. However, LoRaWAN suffers from low reliability due to its ALOHA channel access method. The thesis posits that "Distributed algorithms would increase the protocol's reliability allowing it to meet the requirements of WA-CPSs". Three different application scenarios are explored in this thesis that leverage unexplored aspects of LoRa to meet their requirements. The application scenarios are delay-tolerant vehicular networks, multi-stakeholder WA-CPS deployments and water distribution networks. The systems use novel algorithms to facilitate communication between the nodes and gateways to ensure a highly reliable system. The results outperform state-of-art techniques to prove that LoRa is currently under-utilised and can be used for CPS applications.Open Acces