Análise de vulnerabilidades em redes LoRaWAN sob ataques de negação de serviço

Abstract

IoT applications have been growing significantly in various areas such as healthcare, transportation, agriculture, and industry. Among the communication technologies used in this ecosystem, LoRaWAN has gained prominence due to its long range and low energy consumption. However, like many other wireless communication technologies, LoRaWAN has some security vulnerabilities that can be exploited to cause system malfunctions. This paper aims to evaluate the performance of a LoRaWAN network during a denial of service attack, determining the point at which the network begins to experience significant performance degradation. The network simulation was carried out using the ns-3 network simulator together with the LoRa module. Additionally, the module had to be adapted to include malicious devices responsible for the attacks. The attackers’ goal was to flood the network by continuously sending packets at short intervals. This high volume of packets in the network would cause packet collisions, resulting in the loss of useful packets. Several simulations were conducted with varying parameters to cover different scenarios. The spreading factors affected by the attacks were 7, 9, and 12. The results obtained from the simulations and analyses demonstrate that, at the lowest spreading factor, the addition of a few attacking devices is practically insignificant for the network’s performance. However, this is not the case for higher spreading factors, where adding the same percentage of attackers caused the network’s performance to degrade significantly.