Enhancing LoRaWAN Security: Protection Against Bit Flipping Attacks in IoT Networks

The prominence of the Internet of Things (IoT) has surged in recent years due to tech-nological advancements, increased connectivity, and the widespread adoption of smart devices. Currently, IoT solutions are pervasive across various sectors, including smart homes, wearable devices, health-care, transportation, and industrial automation. The Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is a wireless communication protocol designed to provide reliable connection over long distances, spanning many kilometers, using low-power and wide-area networks (LPWANs) often used in IoT applications. However, LoRaWAN is vulnerable to bit-flipping attacks, where transmitted data is intercepted and maliciously altered by flipping specific bits in the message payload. Such attacks have the potential to undermine the trustworthiness and dependability of the system. In this paper, we propose a novel security enhancement for LoRaWAN. Our scheme incorporates a hash digest along with the end device's payload, enabling the application server to detect any malicious alterations in the received content using the hash value. We analyze the security of the proposed scheme against bit-flipping attacks and measure its performance through experiments in a real testbed. Our observations indicate that the proposed mecha-nism not only secures communication against these attacks but also incurs minimal overhead in terms of power consumption, transmission overhead, and latency.