Abstract
Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) is one of the enabling technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT), and focuses on providing long distance connectivity for a vast amount of smart devices. Currently, LoRa is one of the leading LPWAN solutions available for public use. In LPWANs, especially in LoRa, security is a major concern due to the resource constraints of the devices, the sensitivity level of the transmitted data, the large amount of connected devices, among other reasons. This paper studies the key management mechanism of LoRaWAN environments. A secure architecture for key management based on smart contracts and permissioned blockchain to enhance security and availability in LoRaWAN networks is proposed. To demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed blockchain-based LoRaWAN architecture, a working prototype has been created using open-source tools and commodity hardware. Performance analysis shows that the prototype presents similar execution time and latency values, when compared to a traditional system, especially for small and medium-sized LoRaWAN networks. We also discuss why the proposed solution can be used in environments with a large number of end-devices.
Highlights
Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) is one of the enabling technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT)
Elements is out of scope in this paper but a formal security analysis of LoRaWAN can be found in Reference [38]
All communications between peers in the Hyperledger Fabric network are secured by using the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol
Summary
Low-Power Wide-Area Network (LPWAN) is one of the enabling technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT). All these studies contribute to the fully decentralized vision of the IoT, none of them address the key management scheme of the LoRaWAN standard Such mechanism is extremely relevant to provide security features such as confidentiality, integrity and authentication, but in the current LoRaWAN architecture, it becomes a single point of failure, since it is performed by a single component. To tackle these issues, a fault-tolerant and secure architecture for key management in LoRaWAN networks based on a permissioned blockchain is proposed in this paper.
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