Security Enhancement of OTAA based Joining Procedure in LoRaWAN for Satellite Communication

Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is a wireless communication protocol that facilitates efficient and wide-range communication under low-power conditions. Over-the-air activation (OTAA) is a process recommended by Lo-Ra Wan v1.0.4 (latest version) that enables end devices to join the network with the help of the joining server and generate the session keys for further communications. However, OTAA is vulnerable to potential security threats due to unencrypted join request messages and the reuse of the same encryption keys. In this paper, we present a new security enhancement that addresses the aforesaid security issues. In the proposed scheme, we encrypt the join request message using a secret key to ensure data confidentiality. In addition, we incorporate the use of a random nonce in the proposed joining procedure to protect LoRaWAN against attacks related to the reuse of the same key. We show that the adversary cannot learn sensitive information from the join request message and reuse the AppKey to execute the eavesdropping and unauthorized activation attacks with non-negligible probability.