Analysis of IoT Authentication Over LoRa

Abstract

Implementing a full set of security features within IoT devices is challenging because of constraints on the available resources and power consumption. Nevertheless, such devices must be capable of carrying out mutual authentication with gateways and servers before exchanging data. There are a wide variety of authentication methods that can be used including those based on physically unclonable functions (PUFs), PKI, encryption, and secure hash elements such as MD5 and SHA-3. This work assesses the time and energy associated with authentication protocols in the context of Long Range (LoRa), which is an emerging low-power wide-area network (LPWAN) technology used in IoT devices. LoRa has configurable settings that affect the bandwidth and transmission range. We assess the transmit time, which is proportional to energy consumption, of different authentication techniques over a variety of LoRa configurations and address the level of security provided by the authentication protocols. Our findings suggest that PUF-based authentication is well suited for RF devices operating within an energy and data rate constrained LoRa environment. We propose a PUF-based authentication protocol called PARCE that significantly reduces the RF transmissions for IoT devices.