In partnership with the UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) and The Things Network, French start-up GreenCityzen is using LoRa®-based devices and deploying a LoRaWAN® network to provide an end-to-end solution to secure clean drinking water for refugee camps in Africa.

As you may recall, in May of this year Helium, Semtech, Arm, STMicroelectronics, and the global developer community at Hackster.io teamed up to give developers a little extra incentive build LoRa®-based Internet of Things (IoT) applications using connected devices designed to make the world a better place.

Semtech Proof-of-Concept Kits

The Semtech Smart Building and Asset Tracking Kits have been designed so that the value provided by LoRaWAN® in the smart building and asset tracking spaces can be easily validated by customers who need to quickly demonstrate the value of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions in these verticals.

We launched the LoRa® Developer Portal a little more than a year ago. Our goal was to provide a central hub for developers and solution providers in the LoRa ecosystem; a place to find education and training materials, best practices, user guides, and more. To this end, we have been providing the following resources:

This blog provides details about the security advisory notice regarding versions lower than 4.4.4 of the LoRaMAC-Node™ stack. The associated security advisory notice and stack published by Semtech can be found on Semtech’s GitHub repository.

Low Power, Wide Area Networks (LPWANs) are key to the success of Internet of Things (IoT) deployments that need to cover a broad geographical area. LoRaWAN® is an open protocol for one type of LPWAN, while DASH7 is another. Both use the unlicensed spectrum and together they offer complementary benefits.

1.     The Role of the Gateway in LoRaWAN

The LoRaWAN-based gateway is the physical layer (PHY) interface for the LoRaWAN network server (LNS). On the one hand, it listens to certain parts of the radio spectrum and decodes LoRa®-modulated signals originating from LoRa-based sensors. On the other hand, the gateway transmits messages from the network down to a sensor as LoRa-modulated signals.

On-boarding Devices Securely

There are many diverse applications for LoRaWAN^® devices. Similarly, there is a wide and diverse population of end users. These factors lead to a device on-boarding process that takes just as many forms. Device on-boarding is the process of associating a device with a particular network and application server. It is the foundation of a device's level of security. It precedes and enables device activation, whether over-the-air activation (OTAA) or through activation by personalization (ABP), which themselves become compromised if the device on-boarding is done incorrectly.

To ensure that a LoRaWAN®-based device can be uniquely and securely identified on a network, it needs a unique ID and other security key material. Using a device’s unique, built-in identifier and deriving the appropriate key material is called provisioning the device. In this article, we’ll take a look at the best practices for provisioning your devices.

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