Implementing lightweight key exchange solutions for WSN with LoRa connectivity

Abstract

The emerging applications of wireless sensor networks and internet of things (IoT) require providing IP connectivity to any node in the network, which makes security a crucial issue to take into consideration. Due to the limited resources of connected nodes, new challenges taking into account these constraints have to be overcome. In this work, we investigate authenticated key agreement as a part of providing end-to-end security solutions for wireless sensor networks using LoRa connectivity. We present, along the way, a primer that describes general aspects of security in wireless sensor networks and IoT at different levels. We then discuss the investigated methods for authenticated key agreement. Particularly, we study and implement lightweight key agreement methods based on the standardised internet key exchange protocol. The evaluation is performed through experimentation to present a more realistic assessment that demonstrates communication costs in terms of power consumption and memory usage.