Security Enhancement of Joint Procedure Based on Improved Elliptic Curve Cryptography in LoRaWAN

Abstract

For long-range communication, Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is the appropriate media access layer protocol. This LoRaWAN protocol connects the end devices and the application server through the gateways. The end devices can join the LoRaWAN network by following two processes such as Over-The-Air-Activation (OTAA) and Activation-By-Personalization (ABP). The joining request from the end devices is unencrypted during the process of OTAA. So, to improve the joining process in OTAA, joining requests from the end devices are encrypted using the improved elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) in this paper. To enhance the performance of ECC, the private key is selected optimally using the Artificial Flora (AF) algorithm. AF algorithm solves some complex, non-linear, discrete optimization problems. The proposed novel method of AF-based ECC (AF-ECC) performance outperforms conventional ECC based on latency, timeout messages, and throughput, which is depicted in simulation results.