Long range, low power networks are rapidly gaining acceptance in the Internet of Things (IoT) due to their ability to economically support long-range sensing and control applications while providing multi-year battery life. LoRa is a key example of this new class of network and is being deployed at large scale in several countries worldwide. As these networks move out of the lab and into the real world, they expose a large cyber-physical attack surface. Securing these networks is therefore both critical and urgent. This paper highlights security issues in LoRa and LoRaWAN that arise due to the choice of a robust but slow modulation type in the protocol. We exploit these issues to develop a suite of practical attacks based around selective jamming. These attacks are conducted and evaluated using commodity hardware. The paper concludes by suggesting a range of countermeasures that can be used to mitigate the attacks.

The state-of-practice for Internet of Things (IoT) applications is deployment on specialised networks of embedded devices connected to a cloud backend. While this paradigm has successfully supported a range of IoT systems, its power is limited by the high latency and bandwidth caused by communications with remote data servers and the inability to share specialised IoT infrastructure across applications. To improve these aspects, this paper proposes re-imagining all resources of the IoT infrastructure as microservice-hosting platforms. Applications decomposed as a set of services can then share IoT resources and run communicating modules closer together, tightening control loops and reducing latency and communications. To this end, we present Niflheim, a generic end-to-end middleware that provides modular microservice-based orchestration of applications to deploy and manage them on all resources across the tiers of the IoT, from IoT end-devices through gateways to the cloud. This enables increased flexibility in deployment and operations, while remaining efficient in terms of hardware and software requirements. We evaluate Niflheim in a smart building use case and demonstrate improved latency and bandwidth consumption for applications, while enabling efficient shared use of the IoT infrastructure resources.

The state-of-practice for Internet of Things (IoT) applications is deployment on specialised networks of embedded devices connected to a cloud backend. This paradigm is limited by the high latency and bandwidth incurred by communications with remote data servers and the inability to share specialised IoT infrastructure across applications. Efficiency can be improved by re-imagining all resources of the IoT infrastructure as micro-service hosting platforms. Applications decomposed as a set of services can then share IoT resources and run communicating modules closer together, tightening control loops and reducing latency and communications. This demo showcases Niflheim, a generic end-to-end middleware that provides modular microservice-based orchestration of applications on all resources across the tiers of the IoT, from IoT end-devices through gateways to the cloud. We demonstrate that this enables increased flexibility in application deployment and operations, while remaining efficient in terms of hardware and software requirements.

As we move along the scale of adjustable autonomy for the control of robots from direct teleoperation at one extreme to full automation at the other, several opportunities for improvement in control quality, user feedback and machine learning suggest themselves. We describe three experiments, in telerobotics, the provision of situational awareness, and the acquisition of knowledge for automation from the human operator, and explain our concept of explicit, assigned responsibility as an organising principle for flexible work-sharing between humans and robots. A novel design for an interface based on this principle is outlined.