A Lightweight Authentication Scheme for LoRaWAN Nodes Represented as On-Chain Nonfungible Tokens

QR codes, near-field communication (NFC), and radio frequency identification (RFID) tags have been widely used for supply chain tracking purposes. By binding valuable physical goods with digital nonfungible tokens (NFTs) a physical NFT is created, preventing counterfeit products from penetrating the supply chain. However, QR codes, NFC, and RFID tags are not suitable for real-time monitoring, especially in long-distance tracking applications. As an alternative, long-range wide area network (LoRaWAN) nodes have gained widespread adoption in smart supply chains for their ability to facilitate long-distance monitoring and tracking while consuming low amounts of power. However, challenges to bind LoRaWAN nodes with NFTs exist in the areas of energy consumption and security. Therefore, this article proposes a secure authentication scheme for LoRaWAN nodes, binding them to on-chain NFTs for proof-of-authenticity purposes and LoRaWAN security enhancement. The scheme is compatible with existing LoRaWAN specifications, where microcontroller ID and additional computed information together with the sensor data, temperature in this case, are included as a payload of the uplink message. This scheme is developed using the SHA256 hash function and exclusive-OR operations. The proof of concept demonstrates that the scheme is fully supported by resource-constrained LoRaWAN nodes. The security of the proposed protocol has been analyzed and is proven to be secure from replay, man-in-the-middle, and cloning attacks. The performance of the scheme has been evaluated, and with a computation cost of 1.432 ms, a storage cost of 896-bit, and a gas consumption of 22 984, it shows to outperform other related works.