A Key Management Protocol Based on the Hash Chain Key Generation for Securing LoRaWAN Networks

Abstract

Recently, many Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) protocols have been proposed for securing resource-constrained Internet of Things (IoT) devices with negligible power consumption. The Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is a low power communication protocol that supports message authentication, integrity, and encryption using two-session preshared secret keys. However, although the LoRaWAN supports some security functions, it suffers from session key generation and key update problems. This motivates us to introduce a new key management protocol that resolves the LoRaWAN problems and supports key updates. The proposed protocol is based on hash chain generation using a one-way hash function. Network entities share a common hash chain of n key elements to allow using a unique signing key per message. We also propose a salt hashing algorithm that encrypts the original keys into a different form to avoid the physical attacks at the end device side. We analyzed the proposed key generation performance in terms of the computation time, the required storage, and the communication overhead. We implemented and tested the proposed key generation protocol using the NS-3 network simulator. The proposed lightweight key generation protocol significantly enhances the security of the original LoRaWAN at a negligible overhead. The proposed protocol reduces the power consumption and transmission time by two times compared with some previous protocols. In addition, the proposed key generation protocol can resist attacks, such as key compromising attacks and replay attacks, and it supports the Perfect Forward Secrecy, which was not supported by LoRaWAN.

Keywords

• IoT communication
• LoRaWAN security
• hash chain generation
• key updates issues
• salt encryption
• authentication