Impact of Energy Consumption Attacks on LoRaWAN-Enabled Devices in Industrial Context

Successful deployment of Long-Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) technology in several Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) scenarios, such as Outage Management System (OMS) in smart metering, rely on low energy consumption of the end device. In this work, we conducted an experiment to demonstrate an on-off Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack to analyze the impact on the energy consumption of the LoRaWAN end device. We implemented the attack that manipulates the end device to remain in packet retransmission mode for several seconds. The conducted experiments show that the configurable parameters of LoRaWAN that are required for applications, like OMS, are susceptible to energy consumption attacks. In summary, our results show that when an on-off DoS attack is performed, the end device utilizing the Spreading Factor (SF) 12 consumes 92 times more energy due to packet retransmissions as compared to the end node using SF 7 under no attack.