Investigating LoRa for the Internet of Battlefield Things: A Cyber Perspective

The ability to understand, predict, adapt, and exploit the vast array of inter-networked things that will be present in the future battlefield is critical for maintaining and increasing military competitive advantage. Recently, there has been significant interest in the LoRa waveform and the LoRaWAN protocol for IoT. Using a Chirp-Spread-Spectrum (CSS) modulation technique, LoRa provides robust long range and low power consumption while trading off on bandwidth. These properties make LoRa a waveform of particular interest for military applications, but there is a need to better understand the protocol from a cyber perspective. In this paper, we present a proof-of-concept software radio architecture to intercept and inject LoRa packets using two inexpensive commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) SDR platforms. The primary contributions of this paper are on exploring the challenge of interception and injection of LoRa packets via SDRs as well as conducting basic experiments to evaluate the performance of interception using COTS devices.