Experimental Analysis of AES, ChaCha20, and XOR Encryption in LoRa Networks
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Abstract
As Low-Power Wide-Area Networks (LP-WANs) continue to establish a strong presence in Internet of Things (IoT) environments, providing secure communication becomes increasingly important. For instance, LoRa (Long Range) is a popular low-energy and long-range technology solution, but has no security features which opens the system up to a variety of attacks including eavesdropping and packet injection. This study presents a comparative analysis of three symmetric encryption techniques (AES (Advanced Encryption Standard), ChaCha20, and XOR-based encryption) when deployed over a LoRa-based wireless network. The analysis was carried out in a experimental testbed constructed with Arduino MKRWAN 1310 devices, and a passive LilyGO LoRa32 sniffer, consisting of descriptive experiments measuring packet losses, duplication, and time behavior through 100 transmitted packets. Our results indicate that while AES is able to provide robust security, more packet loss (15%) is observed along with latency variation from computational demands. Comparatively, ChaCha20 and XOR did not experience any packet loss and displayed markedly stable timing, but resulted in increased packets being identified (16% duplication). Our results highlight the compromises of security and performance and provide practical implications for induced encryption choices of secure and reliable low-rate LoRa communications.
