CRAM: Robust Medium Access Control for LPWAN using Cryptographic Frequency Hopping

Ahmar, Absar-Ul-Haque; Aras, Emekcan; Nguyen, Thien Duc; Michiels, Sam; Joosen, Wouter; Hughes, Danny

doi:10.1109/dcoss49796.2020.00026

Cited by 6 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…The preliminary results of CRAM were published in our previous work [10], to which this paper provides the following extensions: (i) A software simulator for CRAM, which will be released as open source in the case that this journal is accepted, (ii) Large-scale network evaluations, (iii) A coexistence analysis of the protocol using real test-bed and (iv) An interference and jamming analysis of the protocol.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design of a Robust MAC Protocol for LoRa

Ahmar

Aras

Nguyen

et al. 2023

ACM Trans. Internet Things

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Low power wide area networks (LPWANs) enable large-scale deployments of low-power wireless devices. LoRaWAN is a long-range wireless technology that has emerged as a low-power and low-data rate solution to support Internet-of-Things applications. Although LoRaWAN provides a low-power and cost-efficient networking solution, recent literature shows that it performs poorly in terms of reliability and security in dense deployments due to the uncoordinated (ALOHA-based) nature of the MAC protocol. Furthermore, LoRaWAN is not robust against selective jamming attacks. This paper proposes CRAM: a time-synchronized cryptographic frequency hopping MAC protocol designed for the LoRa physical layer. CRAM reduces the contention by fairly exploiting the available frequency space and maximises the entropy of the channel hopping algorithm. We develop a large physical test-bed and a simulator to thoroughly evaluate the proposed protocol. Our evaluations show that CRAM significantly improves reliability and scalability and increases channel utilization while making selective jamming difficult to perform compared to the standard LoRaWAN protocol.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design of a Robust MAC Protocol for LoRa

Ahmar

Aras

Nguyen

et al. 2023

ACM Trans. Internet Things

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“…To ensure secret communications, most of the proposed solutions rely on cryptographic schemes. For example, a frequency-hopping scheme was proposed in [ 13 ], while [ 14 ] introduced a reduced complexity advanced encryption system (AES) solution for the key management of LoRa WAN. Finally, recently in [ 15 ] a physical layer encryption method leveraging the randomness of the channel was presented to bypass the use of AES that imposes a burden on complexity for low-cost LoRa nodes.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Novel Scheme for Discrete and Secure LoRa Communications

Demeslay

Gautier

Rostaing

et al. 2022

Sensors

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In this paper, we present a new LoRa transceiver scheme to ensure discrete communications secure from potential eavesdroppers by leveraging a simple and elegant spread spectrum philosophy. The scheme modifies both preamble and payload waveforms by adapting a current state-of-the-art LoRa synchronization front-end. This scheme can also be seen as a self-jamming approach. Furthermore, we introduce a new payload demodulation method that avoids the adverse effects of the traditional cross-correlation solution that would otherwise be used. Our simulation results show that the self-jamming scheme exhibits very good symbol error rate (SER) performance with a loss of just 0.5 dB for a frequency spread factor of up to 10.

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