Rescuing LoRaWAN 1.0

Gildas Avoine, Loïc Ferreira

Abstract

LoRaWAN is a worldwide deployed IoT security protocol. We provide an extensive analysis of the version 1.0, which is the currently deployed version, and we show that it suffers from several weaknesses. We introduce several attacks, including practical ones, that breach the network availability, data integrity, and data confidentiality, and target either an end-device or the backend system. Based on the inner weaknesses of the protocol, these attacks do not lean on potential implementation or hardware bugs. Likewise they do not entail a physical access to the targeted equipment and are independent from the means used to physically protect secret parameters. Finally we propose practical recommendations aiming at thwarting the attacks, while at the same time being compliant with the specification, and keeping the interoperability between patched and unmodified equipment.