Potential Solution Against Duty Cycle Compliant Selective Jamming Attacks in LoRa Networks

The LoRa (Long Range) protocol is designed for long-range communication with minimal energy consumption, thus making it ideal for Internet of Things (IoT) deployments where long distances between devices should be covered. In LoRa networks, communications happen over free unlicensed bands, where jamming attacks represents a huge threat. Thus, providing the correct level of security is crucial, especially when considering the huge number of devices that characterize the Massive IoT (M-IoT) scenario. This work presents a selective jamming attack that aims to reduce the quality of the communications between legacy devices and network server, in a LoRaWAN (LoRa for Wide Area Network) IoT deployment. This paper showed that the LoRaWan standard does not provide itself any solution to this problem. For this reason, a potential countermeasure that implements both an attack mitigation and an intrusion detection mechanism is proposed in this work.