The Things Industries partnership to benefit LoRaWAN

The Things Industries is a full-service Internet of Things (IoT) service provider, specialising in LoRaWAN communication and offering an enterprise-grade LoRaWAN Network Server for a wide range of applications including smart agriculture, smart city and smart building.

The Things Industries founded The Things Network, a global LoRaWAN data network with a set of open tools to build IoT connectivity that currently spans across 100+ countries around the globe and operating thousands of gateways providing coverage to millions of people.

As the number of connected devices using the LoRaWAN network continues to grow in various sectors, security has been, and will be a fundamental concern. The LoRaWAN architecture has been taking security into consideration from the very beginning by integrating end-to-end encryption and using well-vetted algorithms. A thorough implementation remains paramount to ensure the cyber resilience of private and mass-scale deployments.

This includes implementing a physical root of trust for the cryptographic secrets that are used to authenticate the devices connected to the network and to encrypt the data in transit.

CYSEC provides a solution to this problem by integrating The Things Industries’ LoRaWAN Join Server and Network Server into its Trusted Execution Environment called “ARCA”. ARCA is a physical appliance which enables the secure deployment of private LoRaWAN networks on premises by generating, storing and managing the cryptographic keys required by the Application Server and Network Server in a Hardware Security Module (HSM).

Using ARCA in the backend to run The Things Industries’ LoRaWAN stack perfectly complements the partnership of The Things Industries with Microchip Technology, who jointly introduced an embedded Secure Element allowing the secure provisioning, storage and usage of LoRaWAN keys in combination with the internal cryptographic algorithms.

The resulting implementation will offer end-to-end cyber security using physical root of trust on both the devices and the back end, enabling Enterprise customers to build mass-scale, long range and low power data networks combining reliability and security.

Wienke Giezeman, CEO at The Things Industries commented: “Cyber security is becoming more and more important as LoRaWAN private networks are scaling up. We want our Enterprise customers to benefit from the best solutions available without putting the burden on them to set up their own backend infrastructure. Thanks to CYSEC we are able to offer them an integrated solution with state-of-the-art performance and an easy, quick and cost-efficient implementation that complements our partnership with Microchip”

Mathieu Bailly, VP IoT at CYSEC said: “LoRaWAN is a great example of innovation reaching mass adoption and requiring serious cyber protection. Our secured environment ARCA offers the best compromise between the security of well-proven physical hardware with quick and easy implementation using the latest virtualisation tools. We’re delighted to work with a leader in the LoRaWAN ecosystem and to contribute to the growth of the technology.”