Publication detail

Energy Attack in LoRaWAN: Experimental Validation

MIKHAYLOV, K. FUJDIAK, R. POUTTU, A. VOZNAK, M. MALINA, L. MLYNEK, P.

Original Title

Energy Attack in LoRaWAN: Experimental Validation

Type

conference paper

Language

English

Original Abstract

Myriads of new devices take their places around us every single day, making a decisive step towards bringing the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT) in reality. The Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) are today considered to be one of the most perspective connectivity enablers for the resource and traffic limited IoT. In this paper, we focus on one of the most widely used LPWAN technologies, named LoRaWAN. Departing from the traditional data-focused security attacks, in this study we investigate the robustness of LoRaWAN against energy (depletion) attacks. For many IoT devices, the energy is a limited and very valuable resource, and thus in the near future the device's energy may become the target of an intentional attack. Therefore, in the paper, we first define and discuss the possible energy attack vectors, and then experimentally validate the feasibility of an energy attack over one of these vectors. Our results decisively show that energy attacks in LoRaWAN are possible and may cause the affected device to lose a substantial amount of energy. Specifically, depending on the device's SF (Spreading Factor), the demonstrated attack increased the total energy consumption during a single communication event 36% to 576%. Importantly, the shown attack does not require the attacker to have any keys or other confidential data and can be carried against any LoRaWAN device. The presented results emphasize the importance of energy security for LPWANs in particular, and IoT in general.

Keywords

IoT, LoRaWAN, Battery connsumption, Security, Depletation

Authors

MIKHAYLOV, K.; FUJDIAK, R.; POUTTU, A.; VOZNAK, M.; MALINA, L.; MLYNEK, P.

Released

27. 8. 2019

Publisher

ACM

Location

Canterbury, United Kingdom

ISBN

978-1-4503-7164-3

Book

Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2019)

Pages from

1

Pages to

6

Pages count

6

URL

https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3339252.3340525

BibTex

@inproceedings{BUT158730,
  author="Konstantin {Mikhaylov} and Radek {Fujdiak} and Ari {Pouttu} and Lukáš {Malina} and Miroslav {Vozňák} and Petr {Mlýnek}",
  title="Energy Attack in LoRaWAN: Experimental Validation",
  booktitle="Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Availability, Reliability and Security (ARES 2019)",
  year="2019",
  pages="1--6",
  publisher="ACM",
  address="Canterbury, United Kingdom",
  doi="10.1145/3339252.3340525",
  isbn="978-1-4503-7164-3",
  url="https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=3339252.3340525"
}