Abstract
A long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) has a weakness in terms of key management: its root key is static, meaning that it never changes. Since all cryptographic keys are derived from the root key, such a weakness endangers LoRaWAN security. This paper proposes a novel secure root key updating scheme for LoRaWAN that involves periodically changing the root key value based on the <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">CTR_AES DRBG 128</i> algorithm. The scheme consists of two sequential phases: the initialization process that occurs at the end device and the root key update process that occurs at the join server. To validate the proposed scheme, we conduct randomness and communication protocol tests. The results indicate that the proposed scheme has a high degree of randomness, passes all 15 statistical tests in the NIST suite, and has secure communication protocols. The analyses verify that the new scheme has a mechanism to resist replay attacks and protects data integrity. The main advantage of the scheme is that it has a perfect forward secrecy feature that enhances the root key updating scheme with a lightweight computational load for the end device; additionally, root key updating can be performed automatically from a remote distance within the LoRaWAN coverage network. The proposed scheme also supports simultaneous updates for implementation in a large area with many devices. Finally, the overall results demonstrate how our proposed scheme may compensate for the weakness of LoRaWANs in key management and improve their security performance.
Highlights
Long-range wide-area networks (LoRaWANs) are Internet of Things (IoT) technologies that have become the lowpower wide-area (LPWA) standard through Recommendation ITU-T Y.4480 [1]
long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) are widely applied in the industrial IoT (IIoT) [8,9,10], where there are more than 2.7 million LoRa-based gateways used worldwide, more than 163 public and private network operators in various countries, and a total of 225 million units of implemented LoRa-based end devices [11]
We propose a novel secure root key updating scheme for LoRaWANs by utilizing the CTR_AES deterministic random bit generator (DRBG) 128 bits algorithm
Summary
Long-range wide-area networks (LoRaWANs) are Internet of Things (IoT) technologies that have become the lowpower wide-area (LPWA) standard through Recommendation ITU-T Y.4480 [1]. Some studies in [24][31][34] have proposed schemes to update the static root key They come with some limitations, such as providing neither a standard validation for the randomness of the newly generated root key nor a formal security analysis validation for the communication protocol. The main contribution of our work is a novel secure root key updating scheme for LoRaWANs that improves the security of LoRaWAN root key management. The remainder of the paper is organized into sections addressing the theories of LoRaWAN cryptographic keys and related works (Section II), our proposed novel secure root key updating scheme for LoRaWANs (Section III), the validation test, the results and discussion (Section IV), and the conclusions and future work (Section V)
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