Dear all,
We have submitted the paper “Disconnection attacks against LoRaWAN 1.0.X ABP devices”
which has been accepted in the IEEE MetComNet 2020 conference. The paper is about IoT
devices security, and as such is strongly related to WP6. We would like to acknowledge the
SPARTA project. Please find the abstract below.
Best regards,
Giorgio Bernardinetti
Abstract - Previous research work has already
documented vulnerabilities of LoRaWAN 1.0.x, in the form of Replay Attacks which may cause
disconnection situations. To face (also) these concerns, modern network servers implement
careful techniques to handle sequence numbers (frame counters) in the presence of
unexpected/out-of-sequence messages. In this paper we show that, despite such patches, the
problem of dis- connection attacks is still widely open. We document a number of new
replay-type attacks which target ABP (Activation By Personalization) devices, namely
devices which are deployed with an hard-coded set of session keys, and which may cause a
range of disconnection situations, including extremely long term ones - the worst case
being in the order of 232 message transmissions (hundreds/thousands years considering
ordinary IoT rates). We demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed attacks by analyzing
its impact on three different LoRaWAN network server implementations (two well known
open-source network servers, and a proprietary network server co-developed by us), and by
experimentally demonstrate their practicality on two of said network servers (ours and
ChirpStack). Finally, we discuss trade-offs and mitigation actions, though we remark that
these attacks appear intrinsic in the LoRaWAN 1.0.x specification, and can be ultimately
fixed only by migrating to LoRaWAN 1.1.
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Giorgio Bernardinetti
CNIT - National Inter-University Consortium for Telecommunications
Electronic Engineering Department University of Rome "Tor Vergata"
Via del Politecnico 1, 00133 Roma, Italy
Phone: +39 06 7259 7773
Email: giorgio.bernardinetti(a)cnit.it
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