# Security Risk Analysis of LoRaWAN and Future Directions
## 1 Introduction  
The Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing the IT sector and it is predicted that 20 billion IoT devices will seamlessly connect each other to provide information to 3 billion Internet users by the end of 2020 [1]. Thus, the IoT is expected to have a significant impact on our lives in the near future. A special subset of IoT, Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) is significantly increasing its market share and it is projected to have a market worth of 24.5 Billion USD by year 2021 [2]. The IoT is being adopted by many application areas and the communication technologies behind it are still under significant evolution. There exist various communication methods suitable for IoT devices and one way to categorize them is according to the desired wireless communication range. For example, short-range communication technologies such as Bluetooth, ZigBee, and Z-Wave, have been utilized by resource-constrained IoT networks because of their low-energy consumption [3]. On the other hand, these are handicapped by their short-range signal coverage when the application requires tens of kilometers such as in smart cities. Cellular IoT systems have been employed to cope with this problem; however, these systems require high-capacity power supplies along with high-cost hardware and operational cost. All these led to a gap in the IoT communications where technology was needed to provide low power, low cost, and long-range radio communication. To fill this gap, the Low Power Wide Area Networks (LPWAN) technology emerged. Owing to this technology,resource-constrained sensors/actuators can transmit signals up to 10 s of kilometers (up to 5 km in urban areas and up to 15 km in suburban) and have continuous operation for many years (up to 8-10 years) without an external power source [4]. Application domains of LPWAN are expected to grow in various fields, including the following example areas but not limited to [2]:  
* **Smart Gas and Water Metering:** This field is expected to witness the biggest growth rate. The traditional power grid started to be replaced by its smarter counterpart (smart-grid) and therefore smart-metering is one of the most important components, and which lets us understand energy consumption at all the levels of the power grid. The adoption of LPWAN technology by this sector would promote rapid standardization among various smart-meter manufacturers and vendors. * **Oil and gas operations:** LPWAN connected devices and systems can provide more efficient oil and gas operations, by requiring minimum human-intervention, and constitute a higher value than legacy technologies. * **Smart streetlights:** According to [4], a special application of LPWAN called LoRaWAN (this technology will be described thoroughly in the remaining part of this manuscript) has been already selected as an enabling technology to monitor not only light illumination levels, but also traffic intensity and air pollution levels of a city in smart city application. * **Livestock monitoring:** It has been reported that, in another project (_Cattle Txxx_), yet again LoRaWAN has been used to track cows of a farm. End-devices are attached to the ear tags of the cows and gateways around the farm provide the position of the cows with the command center (attached to the application server) [4]. No GPS sensor is attached to the cattle, which leads to less power consumption, eventually less battery usage and less equipment installation on the animal. Hence, traditional triangulation methods are used to calculate the relative positions of the cows from the gateways. Therefore, three or more gateways are deployed in the field. The positions of the gateways are tracked with GPS sensor. LoRa is developed by Semtech Inc. [5] as a proprietary physical layer protocol to provide low-power and long-distance communication up to 20 km (unobstructed line-of-sight) by using a special radio modulation technique: Chirp Spread Spectrum (CSS) [5].