# Security Risk Analysis of LoRaWAN and Future Directions
## 1 Introduction
LoRaWAN is the higher layer protocol (MAC, network and higher layers) based on the LoRa (physical layer), in which the operation and structure of the whole system are defined in detail. Section 3 covers more details of LoRaWAN thoroughly, including presentations related to the network architecture and key distribution mechanisms. We believe LoRa by Semtech is superior when compared to other LPWAN competitors such as SigFox (SigFox Inc. [6]), NB-IoT (3 GPP [7]), Weightless (Weightless Special Interest Group [8]), WAVIoT (Wavid Inc. [9]), Nwave (Nwave Technologies Inc. [10]), RPMA (Ingenu Inc. [11]), UNB (Telensa Inc. [12]), and Qowisio (Qowisio Inc. [13]), due to following unique features [14]:  
* High community support: LoRa users (the implementers and researchers) constitute a big community and they support each other. For example \"The Things Network\" is a crowd-sourced community from 85 countries building a global, public LoRa-based IoT data network [15]. * Installation cost: LoRa end-devices are cheap when compared to its rivals and this is important for large deployments. * Openness: LoRa is an attractive option due to the open nature of the upper layers, with its LoRaWAN open specification [16], the availability of off-the-shelf and low-cost platforms (see, for example, the Gumstix Conduit Dev Boards [17]). The v1.1 of LoRaWAN [16] was released on October 2017 and constitutes the main focus of this paper. The main difference between LoRaWAN v1.0 and v1.1 is that with v1.1 roaming of end-devicesis allowed and made possible with the introduction of an extra server called \"Join Server\". LoRaWAN v1.1 also introduced several security improvements. As in the case of any computer system, security is one of the biggest concerns in LoRaWAN. The proliferation of IoT devices (especially LPWAN/LoRaWAN devices) is dependent on the public acceptance of these devices as a part of a trusted system. So, enhancing the security level of LoRaWAN devices is very important to acquire public support and acceptance. Therefore, in this work, the authors' aim is to open an avenue to the researchers and practitioners in the field by providing an analysis of the security of the latest version of LoRaWAN (v1.1). As mentioned earlier, LoRaWAN is a worldwide-deployed IoT protocol. Several discussions and extensive analysis have been made in the literature on the security of LoRaWAN v1.0 and these are presented in Section 2. In a nutshell, it has been shown that v1.0 suffers from several weaknesses, which may allow adversaries to exploit security breaches in the network. These security breaches impact the network availability, data integrity, and data confidentiality. These attacks do not lean on potential implementation or hardware bugs, being instead based on weaknesses of the protocol. Likewise, they do not entail physical access to the targeted equipment and are independent of the means used to protect secret parameters. To address the mentioned security problems and to provide new functionality, LoRaWAN-Alliance has introduced a new version of LoRaWAN: v.1.1. In this article, we explore the security threats to LoRaWAN v1.1 and we provide practical recommendations aiming at thwarting possible attacks, while at the same time being compliant with the specification, and keeping the interoperability between patched (updated) and non-patched equipment. We present a threat catalog for LoRaWAN v1.1 and analyze these threats in view of the scale, impact, and likelihood of each threat. Finally, we also discuss aspects that are more related to the practical implementation of the technology and while they are not necessarily part of the specification, they are important to highlight for practitioners. LoRa can be considered as the WiMAX (IEEE 802.16) of the IoT technology. Several attacks (Distributed Denial of Service and Water Torture attacks) against WiMAX has shown to be dreadful [18]. These attacks not only were degrading the network performance but also were diminishing the battery reserves drastically.