Stream Cipher-Based Mutual Authentication for Low-Power LoRa P2P Devices

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been widely implemented in various industrial sectors in Indonesia. Examples of these implementations include devices for monitoring home electricity usage, automation tools in industry, and early warning systems for forest fires. IoT implementations often use resource-constrained devices. This poses a challenge for developers seeking lightweight algorithms to secure IoT data. Therefore, lightweight stream cipher encryption algorithms were selected, including Snow-3G, Snow-V, Rabbit, and ZUC. This study proposes a stream-cipher-based mutual authentication scheme employing a random Initialization Vector (IV) in the mutual authentication process for LoRa Peer-to-Peer (P2P). BAN Logic is used in this study as a tool for mutual authentication validation. This study uses low-power ATmega328P hardware for the protocol. The results of this study demonstrate an improvement in LoRa P2P network security through mutual authentication using a random IV. This study also successfully benchmarked the performance of four stream cipher algorithms. The encryption and decryption process of 256 bytes of data takes 53.89 milliseconds (ms) for Snow-3G, 11.36 ms for Snow-V, 7.78 ms for Rabbit, and 15.04 ms for ZUC.