LoRaWAN: Vulnerability Analysis and Practical Expoitation

Master thesis (2017)

Authors

X. Yang Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Contributors

F.A. Kuipers (mentor)
C. Dörr (graduation committee member)
Faculty
Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science
Copyright: © 2017 Xueying Yang
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

28-07-2017

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science

Abstract

Internet of Things (IoT) applications nowadays have a wide impact on people’s daily life while the size of IoT has been increasing rapidly. Millions of devices huge amount of data and different kinds of new protocols can bring many security issues.
LoRaWAN is a MAC layer protocol for long-range low-power communication dedicated to the IoT. It can be used to transmit messages between IoT end devices and gateways. However, since the development of LoRaWAN is still at an early stage, the security level of the protocol is not well developed, and the need for analyzing and developing the security level of LoRaWAN is necessary and urgent.
This research summarizes the secure features of LoRaWAN in the aspects of activation methods, key management, cryptography, counter management and message acknowledgement.
Then, vulnerabilities of LoRaWAN are found and analyzed. 4 Attacks
based on these vulnerabilities are designed and described via an attack tree method. These attacks are (1) replay attack, (2) eavesdropping, (3) bit flipping and (4) ACK spoofing. As a poof-of-concept, the attacks are implemented and executed in a LoRaWAN environment. Afterwards, mitigation and secure solutions against attacks are given to protect the security of LoRaWAN networks.
The result of this research can be used in developing the security level of LoRaWAN protocol and setting the standard criteria for evaluating security of LoRaWAN devices.

Files

Thesis_Xueying.pdf
(.pdf | 5.55 Mb)