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MAC Aggregation for Secure LoRa Communication

IoT Security Master Thesis Kirchberg Campus

Overview

Message Authentication Codes (MACs) ensure the integrity of data in transit. However, due to severe bandwidth constraints, the LoRa protocol truncates MACs to just 4 bytes, well below the security levels recommended by NIST. As LoRa is increasingly considered for use in critical infrastructure, for example, as a backup communication link for wind turbines, providing strong integrity protection is essential.

In this project, you will investigate the feasibility of applying MAC aggregation in LoRa to jointly authenticate multiple messages while maintaining strong security guarantees without increasing bandwidth usage. The effectiveness of MAC aggregation has been demonstrated in other lossy protocols, such as DTLS 1.3, but its integration into LoRa remains unexplored. To evaluate your approach in a realistic setting, you will implement and test your modifications to the LoRa stack on an LR1121 development board.

Requirements

Programming experience in C/C++
Experience with embedded systems

References

Wagner, Eric, Martin Serror, Klaus Wehrle, and Martin Henze. “When and how to aggregate message authentication codes on lossy channels?.” In ACNS’24.
Wagner, Eric, David Heye, Jan Bauer, Klaus Wehrle, and Martin Serror. “MAC Aggregation over Lossy Channels in DTLS 1.3.” In ICNP’25.

Note: You may be subject to a coding challenge during the application process