Challenges of Securing Low-Power LoRaWAN Devices Deployed in Advanced Manufacturing

Mohammad Monjur, Joseph Heacock, Joshua Calzadillas, Rui Sun, Qiaoyan Yu
University of New Hampshire


Abstract

Compared to traditional manufacturing, advanced manufacturing is expected to support more innovative, reliable, and affordable manufacturing. Cutting-edge technologies, such as Long-Range Wide-Area Network (LoRaWAN), have been adopted in advanced manufacturing to enable the increasing demand for cost-effective automation, remote monitoring and control, and long-duration maintenance. However, the utilization of LoRaWAN will bring in new and unexplored security threats to the manufacturing pipeline. The existing effort on LoRaWAN security mainly focuses on cyber attacks. There is limited work available to investigate the physical attacks from supply chain and on-site tampering. To fill this gap, this work demonstrates three physical attacks executed in the LoRa nodes and analyzes the challenges of detecting and mitigating those attacks. Furthermore, this work proposes an attack detection method for LoRaWAN. The experimental results show that the proposed method can successfully capture the jamming and replay attacks and differentiate the malicious LoRa packet transmission from legitimate ones.