“IoT Device Firmware Update over LoRa: The Blockchain Solution”

Abstract

More and more Internet of Things (IoT) devicesare deployed around the world, due to the convenience andextra functionality they enable. This growth, while great forthe industry as a whole, has come at a price with respect toensuring and maintaining security and privacy. Having that inmind, one of the most common solutions to the IoT securityproblem is to update the devices frequently. Recently, LoRaAlliance has released a new specification (FUOTA) on how toperform firmware updates using LoRa technology. In this paper,we propose a blockchain-based framework to securely updatethe firmware of the IoT devices using the LoRa communicationprotocol. As a first step, we perform an evaluation of the firmwareupdate procedure using different network sizes and differentfirmware sizes. The evaluation shows that there is a need to usemore gateways that will collaborate to increase the reliability andthe performance of the firmware update process.