WHITEPAPER | February 10, 2020

LoRaWAN Networks Susceptible to Hacking: Common Cyber Security Problems, How to Detect and Prevent Them

LoRaWAN is fast becoming the most popular wireless, low-power WAN protocol. It is used around the world for smart cities, industrial IoT, smart homes, etc., with millions of devices already connected.

The LoRaWAN protocol is advertised as having “built-in encryption” making it “secure by default.” As a result, users are blindly trusting LoRaWAN networks and not paying attention to cyber security; however, implementation issues and weaknesses can make these networks easy to hack.

Currently, cyber security vulnerabilities in LoRaWAN networks are not well known, and there are no existing tools for testing LoRaWAN networks or for detecting cyber attacks, which makes LoRaWAN deployments an easy target for attackers.

In this paper, we describe LoRaWAN network cyber security vulnerabilities and possible cyber attacks, and provide useful techniques for detecting them with the help of our open-source tools.