I send, therefore I leak: Information leakage in low-power wide area networks
Abstract
Low-power wide area networks (LPWANs), such as LoRa, are fast emerging as the preferred networking technology for large-scale Internet of Things deployments (e.g., smart cities). Due to long communication range and ultra low power consumption, LPWAN-enabled sensors are today being deployed in a variety of application scenarios where sensitive information is wirelessly transmitted. In this work, we study the privacy guarantees of LPWANs, in particular LoRa. We show that, although the event-based duty cycling of radio communication, i.e., transmission of radio signals only when an event occurs, saves power, it inherently leaks information. This information leakage is independent of the implemented crypto primitives. We identify two types of information leakage and show that it is hard to completely prevent leakage without incurring significant additional communication and computation costs.
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BibTex
@INPROCEEDINGS{leu2018therefore,
isbn = {978-1-4503-5731-9},
copyright = {In Copyright - Non-Commercial Use Permitted},
doi = {10.3929/ethz-b-000281724},
year = {2018-06},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Security & Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks},
type = {Conference Paper},
institution = {EC},
author = {Leu, Patrick and Puddu, Ivan and Ranganathan, Aanjhan and Capkun, Srdjan},
abstract = {Low-power wide area networks (LPWANs), such as LoRa, are fast emerging as the preferred networking technology for large-scale Internet of Things deployments (e.g., smart cities). Due to long communication range and ultra low power consumption, LPWAN-enabled sensors are today being deployed in a variety of application scenarios where sensitive information is wirelessly transmitted. In this work, we study the privacy guarantees of LPWANs, in particular LoRa. We show that, although the event-based duty cycling of radio communication, i.e., transmission of radio signals only when an event occurs, saves power, it inherently leaks information. This information leakage is independent of the implemented crypto primitives. We identify two types of information leakage and show that it is hard to completely prevent leakage without incurring significant additional communication and computation costs.},
language = {en},
address = {New York, NY},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
title = {I send, therefore I leak: Information leakage in low-power wide area networks},
PAGES = {23 - 33},
Note = {11th ACM Conference on Security & Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks; Conference Location: Stockholm, Sweden; Conference Date: June 18-20, 2018}
}Research Collection: 20.500.11850/281724