NB-IoT battery depletion via malicious interference

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NBIOT_BAT_SHORT__Final_-2.pdf(2.54 MB)
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Date
2022
Authors
Ionescu, Vlad
Roedig, Utz
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Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
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Abstract
Narrowband Internet of Things (NB-IoT) is a popular Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN) technology for large-scale Internet of Things (IoT) applications. The NB-IoT protocol is designed to conserve energy, so battery powered devices can have a lifetime of several years. However, the protocol design does not assume malicious interference. As we show in this paper jamming can be used to deplete the battery of NB-IoT devices reducing the lifetime from many years to several month. These attacks can be carried out without preventing data delivery entirely and are therefore hard to detect. We consider jamming focused on the initial unprotected downstream communication after a node wakes from sleep. We show that the most efficient interference can be constructed by exploiting the capture effect; the attacker can replace a subframe within the transmission from the base station to the device.
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Keywords
Narrowband Internet of Things , Low Power Wide Area Network
Citation
Ionescu, V. and Roedig, U. (2022) 'NB-IoT battery depletion via malicious interference', EWSN '22: Proceedings of the 2022 International Conference on Embedded Wireless Systems and Networks, pp. 244–249. doi: 10.5555/3578948.3578987