A Secure and Fault-Tolerant Architecture for LoRaWAN Based on Blockchain

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm aims to bring continuous interaction between small embedded devices and humans. The IoT has the potential to affect our daily lives and bring many benefits to society. Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWAN) is a new IoT technology that offers long distance connectivity for a massive number of devices. LPWAN is a promising solution to enable complex IoT scenarios, such as smart cities and smart healthcare. LoRa is currently one of the leading LPWAN solutions available for public use. Due to the great number of connected devices and, in some cases, sensitive data transmitted in IoT networks, security is one of the main concerns in LPWAN. In this paper, we focus on the issues of key management in LoRaWAN. We propose a secure architecture for key management based on private blockchain and smart contracts in order to increase the levels of security and availability in LoRaWAN environments. In order to show the feasibility of the proposed architecture, a working prototype was implemented using open-source tools and commodity hardware.