Analysis of LPWAN: Cyber-security vulnerabilities and privacy issues in LoRaWAN, Sigfox, and NB-IoT

The realm of low power wide area network (LPWAN) has revolutionized access to different varieties of applications over the Internet. Some of these technologies include Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN), Narrow-Band IoT (NB-IoT), and Sigfox, which enable long-range transmission over extremely low power consumption. However, such technologies face the problem of cyber-security and privacy vulnerability issues. This chapter presents a comparative study among LoRaWAN, Sigfox, and NB-IoT in detail. More importantly, the chapter discusses cyber-security vulnerabilities and privacy issues of LPWAN technologies which would hinder reliable communication in the IoT networks. Especially, all possible attack possibilities are investigated under Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability (CIA) triad. Furthermore, several countermeasures addressing aforementioned LPWAN attacks are also considered and studied thoroughly.