Enhancement in LoraWAN’s Security With Post-Quantum Key Encapsulation Method

Ensuring data privacy and integrity is imperative in wireless connection. Sensitive information needs to be transmitted through long-distance areas in many scenarios as healthcare, agricultural production and smart cities. Not only security, but also performance in this particular type of communication is not a trivial match. The LoRaWAN protocol is capable of transmitting data between IoT as end devices to application servers where the data can be analyzed and stored. The protocol offers a significant security standard and a recognized performance in long-range communication at low cost. However, the advances in Quantum Computing also bring threats to the current state of cryptographic algorithms, possibly compromising communication privacy. LoRaWAN’s security is based on AES-128 cryptographic algorithm, which is not safe to quantum computers. Thus, this work proposes an enhancement in LoraWAN’s security protocol adding the Kyber KEM-1024 algorithm to reinforce the protocol against quantum-computing attacks. The implementation successfully simulated the communication between an end device and an application server performing the post-quantum algorithm KEM-1024. Despite the results for time of execution can be improved, the proposal presented a safe communication resistant to quantum-computing attacks.