A Secure Device-to-Device Link Establishment Scheme for LoRaWAN

In the Internet of Things (IoT) era, the importance of communication technology to support communication between the various types of devices has become greater than ever before. Long Range (LoRa) and Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) are newly designed communication technologies for low-power long-distance communication in the IoT environment. Recently, LoRa and LoRaWAN have received much attention in academia and industry because low-power long-distance communication has not been supported by traditional communication technologies. Current LoRaWAN supports only communication between the end node and the central server. A recently introduced study enables device-to-device (D2D) communication in the LoRaWAN environment, which is not supported by the current LoRaWAN standard. This paper shows that direct communication between devices can reduce battery consumption. However, security is not considered in this paper and the security features of the LoRaWAN standard are also not applicable, which means that LoRaWAN D2D communication is exposed to a security threat. Therefore, we propose a secure link establishment scheme to protect the LoRaWAN D2D communication. With our scheme, both D2D nodes can securely share cryptographic keys for protecting the D2D communication. Through the security analysis, we prove that our scheme guarantees mutual authentication, confidentiality, and integrity. Performance evaluation shows that our scheme increases power consumption by approximately 5% compared with the basic scheme without security, but has little impact on overall battery lifetime. Consequently, the proposed scheme guarantees fundamental security requirements with sufficient feasibility.