The HopeRF RFM95w module proposes to access LoRa at low cost. Its unitary price is around 4€ on shop like aliexpress. A version with a shield is also existing. Its name is Lora1276-C1 from niceRF. These different transceivers are using Semtech SX1276 chip. It makes this kind of chip interesting for regional low cost LoRaWAN design in association with a MCU. Here we are going to use it with an Arduino platform.
Continue reading
The Sigfox Micro basestation has been announced during the last Sigfox Connect event in Berlin. The base-station allow to extend the Sigfox public network, at low price, for your private location.
This post is detailing my experience with the micro base-station and the field test I’ve made on an industrial site.
Continue reading
Sigfox is not publishing its detailed specifications. For this reason different people (like me) are doing reverse engineering. Thank to this activity we are now getting more and more information on how the IoT network communication works. I’ve been the first one to publish the uplink frame in details more than a year ago.
Today, during the 35th edition of CCC Congress, Florian Euchner has published, on Github, the first Open-Source Sigfox stack : LibRenard.
This library allows to transform a Sigfox radio signal into a decoded frame (uplink demodulation). It allows to create a Sigfox radio signal from a decoded frame (downlink modulation).
The LibRenard implementation follows the Open Sigfox Protocol specification also host on Github from Florian. It details the uplink as the downlink communication frames. Making this open specification as the real first Sigfox global protocol specification published.
I really want to congratulate Florian for this excellent work. I hope the stack will be soon enriched with the native Sigfox encryption I’ve just finished to detail, with the associated OOB frames.
The usual attack on Sigfox network is related to the “security”. Behind this large concept, for real, the only point is related to the use of clear payload over the air. As a consequence some are extending this to the possible replay after 2048 frames so regarding a standard use of Sigfox is will be about 6 month later…
That said, for real, all of this is just ignorance from these pseudo “security” experts and developer laziness. Don’t beat me for saying that, I’m part of the lazy developer, the only difference is I’m not complaining and I’m aware the solution is in my own hands.
Because, for real, the payload encryption exists as documented in the post I’ve published on May 2017 and detailed on the Feb 2017 technical security paper published by Sigfox or like in this document.
So saying the Sigfox is not proposing payload encryption is wrong and this option is also fixing any 6 months later message replay. It’s like saying WiFi is not secured because you can create an open-network.
So now, let’s see why encryption is not the default option, why a network encryption standard is not the best option and then see how to stop to be a lazy developer and make encryption working.
Continue reading
When you write an IoT firmware, there are different things you may never forget to think about… The coming 10 things you can’t ignore are coming from my experience of smart object creation and the associated field experience.
The field experience is unfortunately the real step where you will improve your firmware and discover all you have forgotten when you have written the firmware and tested it in your laboratory. In laboratory everything is perfect.
The following 10 things you can’t ignore when writing a Firmware is a non exhaustive checklist of points to verify before pushing your code to the field. It is also a list of test conditions you can execute to validate a Firmware / device made by a third party.
Continue reading
STM32 solution for using Sigfox is actually one of the best offer on the market has the solution is powerful, low consumption and allows global coverage with the use of the last Sigfox library versions including Monarq, Bubble… Different module providers are actually designing solutions based on this platform.
In this post we are going to see how to configure the STM32 platform, starting from a STM32L053 devkit plus a S2LP extension. Using a eclipse/gcc environment. The environment installation is described in this post about installing Eclipse for STM32.
For the second year I had the chance to introduce the IoT and LPWAN networks to a group of 150 students in computer engineering school. This year we add a longer time to detail a bit the Sigfox and LoRaWan solution and I’ve added a part on the IoT security.
I’ve tried to propose a different point of view on security aspect, not based on fear but practical things to do and a larger contextual aspect. I’ll try to make video on this specific topic on my Youtube (where you can find in french most of the content of these slides).
So … here are the slides, for my students who joined or not the conferences, and for those who would like to join this course.
In a previous post, I was complaining a bit about the Sigfox API. At this time Sigfox was already working on a new version of the APIs.
Today Sigfox released the API version 2 for managing devices, subscriptions, messages… And this new version based on REST and JSON standards is a really positive rupture compared to the previous one.
More than a new version of the API set it’s also the full deployment of some of the new backend components now accessible by the API deployment. As part of this the 2018 deployed new Group entity, the asynchronous device creation/edition processing and the coming replacement of the callback duplicates to the equivalent with API.
As part of this APIs also some coming features like different level of geolocation precision, payload encryption and many more…