A secure and lightweight authentication protocol for gateways in lorawan networks.

Abstract

One of the most used networks in the world of IoT (LoRaWAN), which allows to carry out smart applications of various types such as: smart agriculture, smart parking, smart metering, among others. At the same time that it offers great possibilities of being able to carry out various applications, it is exposed to security vulnerabilities that can compromise its integrity, confidentiality and availability (CIA). Within the elements that make up the LoRaWAN infrastructure there are the gateways. These devices, despite being key in sending (uplink), receiving (downlink) and transforming LoRa packets into TCP / IP, do not have an authentication mechanism so that can be registered within the LoRaWAN infrastructure. This represents a security issue because malicious users could take advantage of this weakness to inject invalid packets into the infrastructure. That is why we have considered delving into this aspect of the protocol to generate a solution that allows such authentication and also strengthens the relationship between the End-Node and the Gateway; and the Gateway with the Network Server.