Security in LP-WAN Technologies: Challenges and Solutions

The IoT has brought a digital revolution in connecting vast number of heterogeneous devices together through wireless communication. Definitely it brings a comfort and convenience to the people’s life but on the counterpart the security, privacy and information leakage has become a prime concern specially in the area of finance, trading and healthcare. By the rapid growth of the market low power wide area network technologies have become the area of interest. Narrow band IoT (NB-IoT) and Long range (LoRa) are quite efficient in providing indoor and outdoor coverage with low data rate. Unlicensed LoRa supports a long-range coverage with longer battery life, cost, capacity. While, licensed NB-IoT benefits in terms of latency, reliability, QoS and range. Both the protocols are encapsulated with cryptographic algorithms to provide the secure communication. But still are vulnerable to a wide range of attacks. In this paper network architecture, vulnerabilities, possible security breaches and counter solutions of NB-IoT and LoRa are discussed.