Disrupting LoRaWAN IoT Deployments: Analysis of Join DoS Attacks in Practical Scenarios

The massive deployment of resource-constrained IoT ecosystems has been made possible owing to efficient transmission technologies. To this aim, the LoRaWAN standard is gaining momentum, especially since it supports long-range transmission capabilities with a reduced energy consumption. Despite its security model is becoming well understood, issues of the process used by nodes to join the network have been only partially assessed, especially in real-world scenarios. Therefore, this paper investigates practical aspects of the Join DoS attack, i.e., a novel threat that can prevent nodes to join a LoRaWAN network. To assess its impact, we conducted tests in both simulated and real network conditions. Results demonstrated the effectiveness of the attack and allowed us to elaborate some prime mitigation techniques, especially in the view of supporting the deployment of LoRaWAN in softwarized environments.