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Nicolas Small

Publications and source records attributed to Nicolas Small.

2 recordsLinked to original sources
arXiv2017

Tackling Contention Through Cooperation: A Distributed Federation in LoRaWAN Space

Low-Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) play a key role in the IoT marketplace wherein LoRaWAN is considered a leading solution. Despite the traction of LoRaWAN, research shows that the current contention management mechanisms of LoRaWAN do not scale. This paper tackles contention on LoRaWAN by introducing FLIP, a fully distributed and open architecture for LoRaWAN that fundamentally rethinks how LoRa gateways should be managed and coordinated. FLIP transforms LoRa gateways into a federated network that provides inherent support for roaming while tackling contention using consensus-driven load balancing. FLIP offers identical security guarantees to LoRaWAN, is compatible with existing gateway hardware and requires no updates to end-device hardware or firmware. These features ensure the practicality of FLIP and provide a path to its adoption. We evaluate the performance of FLIP in a large-scale real-world deployment and demonstrate that FLIP delivers scalable roaming and improved contention management in comparison to LoRaWAN. FLIP achieves these benefits within the resource constraints of conventional LoRa gateways and requires no server hardware.

cs.NI↗
arXiv2017

Selective Jamming of LoRaWAN using Commodity Hardware

Long range, low power networks are rapidly gaining acceptance in the Internet of Things (IoT) due to their ability to economically support long-range sensing and control applications while providing multi-year battery life. LoRa is a key example of this new class of network and is being deployed at large scale in several countries worldwide. As these networks move out of the lab and into the real world, they expose a large cyber-physical attack surface. Securing these networks is therefore both critical and urgent. This paper highlights security issues in LoRa and LoRaWAN that arise due to the choice of a robust but slow modulation type in the protocol. We exploit these issues to develop a suite of practical attacks based around selective jamming. These attacks are conducted and evaluated using commodity hardware. The paper concludes by suggesting a range of countermeasures that can be used to mitigate the attacks.

cs.NI↗