SLoRa: towards secure LoRa communications with fine-grained physical layer features

ABSTRACT

LoRa, which is considered as an appealing wireless technique for Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LPWANs), has found wide applications in fields such as smart cities, intelligent agriculture. Despite its popularity, there exists a growing concern about secure communications mainly due to the free frequency band and minimalist design specified in LoRa communications. For example, an attacker can forge messages to launch spoofing attack. To mitigate the threat, an authentication mechanism is needed. In this paper, we propose a lightweight node authentication scheme named SLoRa for LoRa networks by leveraging two physical layer features-Carrier Frequency Offset (CFO) and spatial-temporal link signature. In particular, we propose a novel CFO compensation algorithm, and identify slight CFO variations by adopting linear fitting for received upchirps to mitigate the noise's randomness on fine-grained CFO estimation. Besides, we can obtain fine-grained link signatures without the conventional de-convolution operation based on the theoretical analysis. Then, we show how these two physical-layer features complement each other to conquer the drift challenge brought by weather and environment variations. Combining these two features, SLoRa can distinguish whether the received signal is conveyed from a legitimate LoRa node or not. Experiments covering indoor and outdoor scenarios are conducted to demonstrate a high accuracy for node authentication in SLoRa, which is around 97% indoors and 90% outdoors.

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Index Terms

• Networks

  • Network protocols

    • Network protocol design