IoT security: Safeguarding privacy and safety

With the Internet-of-Things now entering our daily lives, security is more 
important than ever.
The unprecedented interaction with the physical world that IoT entails has potential impact 
on the safety and privacy of individuals. 
Securing the IoT can be a challenge as the devices are often deployed in large quantities, 
and the associated business models do not afford manual per-device configuration.

Many IoT devices and radio protocols are severely constrained and rely on intermediaries for processing and caching. This means that in many cases IoT requires new or modified software and protocols.

Here at Ericsson Research, we are working on many technologies that are designed to ensure IoT security, privacy and safety. Most of them are released as open standards or open source, to encourage collaboration and contribution from academia, industrial partners and talented individuals:

– 3GPP technologies provide global connectivity and offer unrivaled robustness compared to unlicensed spectrum. One current focus area is to make 3GPP technologies an even better fit for IoT by introducing battery-friendly sleep modes and lightweight signaling. For 2G, EC-GSM-IoT introduces modern ciphers for integrity protection. For 4G, LTE-M and NB-IoT bring several improvements to LTE, including lower device cost, improved battery life, improved coverage, and support for a massive number of connections where security procedures are optimized for transmission of small data. 5G and the evolution of 4G will bring further improvements, such as the use of alternative credentials and the ability for factories and other industries to set up their own networks.

– Calvin is an IoT-application environment that enables distributed applications running on a ‘mesh’ of connected devices. This facilitates the creation of complex software-defined systems built out of separate hardware components. Calvin makes no distinction between cloud and device and programmers do not need to worry about which hardware an application will be deployed on – instead, developers can focus on what to do with little concern of where to do it. Application components called actors can also securely migrate between platforms in real-time to best utilize the resources of a network. We are considering security solutions for all layers of Calvin with regards to platform security, transport security, identity management, and application layer security. Calvin is available from GitHub, and you can read more about it in earlier posts here on our blog, and in this conference paper.

– Security at the application layer provides an attractive option for enabling end-to-end security in the presence of proxies and non-IP paths. HTTP and JSON are extremely popular on the web, and we believe that CoAP and CBOR will be as popular for the IoT. OSCOAP is a lightweight and flexible way to secure CoAP enabling many topologies, such as multicast and Publish–Subscribe. EDHOC is a key exchange protocol with forward secrecy built for constrained devices. ACE is an authorization framework built as a profile of the industry standard OAuth and with profiles for both OSCOAP and DTLS.

– Nimble out-of-band authentication for EAP (EAP-NOOB) is a new EAP method intended for bootstrapping all kinds of IoT-enabled devices that have a minimal user interface and no pre-configured authentication credentials.

As editor of the IoT Security white paper, I was pleased to receive contributions from experts across our company. In 2017, Ericsson Research will publish much more about our exciting new IoT-related research, so keep an eye on the Ericsson Research blog.

Please find more reading here:

• Ericsson Security highlights web
• Ericsson Internet-of-Things security page
• White paper: Ericsson, Cellular Networks for Massive IoT (January 2016)
• White paper: Ericsson, 5G Security – Scenarios and Solutions (June 2015)

Source:Ericsson Research - blog

NB-IoT and band 70 – What is your opinion?

RF engineers already know that signal propagation characteristics vary according to frequency. In simple terms, signals carried at lower frequencies travel further.

Since wavelength equals the speed of light divided by the period of the carrier signal, we can see that low frequency signals have a long wavelength. Long wavelength, low frequency radio waves are able to diffract over obstacles such as hills and valleys where a line of sight is not possible. They also follow the curvature of the earth leading to extended range. We will see on another blog how the earth’s curvature is related to antenna height and maximum range.

This type of signal propagation is called “ground wave”. Attenuation of signal strength over distance by absorption into the ground is lower for long wavelength radio waves than it is for high frequency, short wave transmissions. This is why the LPWAN industry is fortunate to have access to sub-1 GHz frequency spectrum – so called ISM (Industrial, Scientific and Medical) bands. In the EU these are usually centred around 868 MHz – around 915 MHz in the US. However, intelligent protocols such as Weightless-P are also able to use 169 MHz and 470MHz with a 12.5 kHz channel bandwidth.

Every developer wants the best coverage and range so you’d imagine that the 3GPP community would not be looking to use higher frequencies when we have already seen how this compromises signal propagation. Band 70 uses spectrum in the 1695 – 1710 MHz range for uplink and 1995 – 2020 MHz for downlink. The higher frequency compromises range and the large range of frequencies from 1695 – 2020 MHz makes antenna design significantly more complex. In short, why use band 70 in NB-IoT if band 8 and 20 offer so much more range?

3GPP Approves NB-IoT Support for Band 70 – Read more:

http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20161212005311/en/3GPP-Approves-NB-IoT-Support-Band-70

The Egli model is a terrain based radio propagation model. We will be discussing the Egli Model in detail in another blog but for now just be aware that it is used to forecast total path loss in a point-to-point link.

The Egli propagation model tells us:
Egli free space loss = 10log10 (4 x Pi x distance x 7 / c)ˆ2

The Egli model was used to calculate the signal propagation characteristics outside and already takes into consideration the path loss related to the earth’s surface. We need to set parameters in the Egli model and we have used the following:
– NB-IoT base station antenna height is 20 meters
– NB-IoT end device antenna height is 2 meters
– NB-IoT maximum penetration loss = 164 dB

NB-IoT coverage
Frequency (MHz)	Range (km)	Area (km2)
900	16.8	868.7
1800	11.9	444.9
2020	11.2	394.0

If we change the frequency from 900 MHz to 1800 MHz then the covered area is reduced by around 50%. This means that we have to double the number of base stations to cover the same region.

Let’s retry the Egli radio propagation model with re-calibrated parameters for Weightless-P:

Egli model with parameters for classic LPWAN and 14 dBm in EU:

– LPWAN base station antenna height = 20 meters
– LPWAN end device antenna height = 2 meters
– LPWAN maximum penetration loss = 150 dB (14 dBm Tx & -136 dBm Rx sensitivity)

If we run our LPWAN on 169 MHz instead of 868 MHz then the coverage can be increased from 186 km2 to 940 km2. With LoRaWAN or Weightless-P, we can achieve a maximum range of estimated 7.7 km. With Weightless-P on 169 MHz, we already achieve 17.3 km. Comparing the coverage then this will increase from 182 km2 to 940 km2.

Weightless-P coverage
frequency (MHz)	Range (km)	Area (km2)
169*	17.3	940.2
470*	10.4	339.8
868	7.7	186.2
900**	7.5	176.7
1800**	5.3	88.2

Notes

* 169 MHz and 470 MHz are limited to 12.5 kHz or 25 kHz bandwidth. In both cases, these bands are not possible for LoRaWAN in the EU where they require 125 kHz bandwidth at the end device.

** 900 MHz and 1800 MHz are licensed cellular bands for comparison only.

The maximum Tx power in the 169 MHz band is regulated to 500 mW which equates to 27 dBm. This means that the link budget will already be 13 dB higher. However, if we want more coverage for our classic LPWAN then we can simply follow the cellular base station approach and deploy antennas with high gain at the base station end of the link. This is an economical option given that an omnidirectional 9dBi gain antenna is inexpensive. A higher performance option would be an 18 dBi sector antenna with 3 way splitter. The splitter and the cables derives a small loss but with 18 dB more gain the range at 868 MHz will increase from 7.7 km to 22 km and the coverage will rise from 186 km2 to 1520 km2.
If you plan your own private LPWAN or to use a public LPWAN, then do not hesitate to drop an email to harald.naumann (at) gsm-modem.de .

Source: IoT M2M Blog by Harald Naumann

Towards a new Telecoms Framework

Reasons for Change

The EU telecoms regulatory framework played an important role in the context of the liberalisation of formerly monopolistic telecommunications markets. Since then, markets have changed dramatically, with the emergence of new players, convergence in technology and services, and radically different patterns of consumer behaviour. Today, increased choice and innovation provide citizens and businesses with a wide range of choice of services, at affordable prices. The market dynamics show a continuing trend of transformation in a fast-paced and rapidly changing environment. ETNO welcomes the drive of the European Commission to conduct a review aimed at dealing with the current policy challenges, acknowledging the more complex market structure and increased competition between different technologies and services in telecom markets. The EU should create the right conditions for European operators to maximise investments in advanced digital infrastructures, by simplifying regulation and stimulating competition between undertakings ready to invest.

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