LORA BASED MESSAGING SYSTEM FOR UNDERGROUND MINING

A company Swinburne has been working with for some time is interested in the potential use of LoRa underground. Some projects that have already been explored have been detonation of explosives and monitoring the locality of equipment and people underground.

This project is to use LoRa for transmission and reception of simple text messages. LoRa is to be used as the technology for transmitting and receiving messages at laptops connected to a LoRa transceiver.

The system is to comprise sender$/$receivers at either end and relays between the end points that forward messages on$.$ There is to be a GUI that transmits messages and displays received messages.

The hardware that is to be used is the Dragino LoRa transceiver on an Arduino UNO or YUN microcontroller.

Each team will be supplied with three transceivers and three microcontrollers. Additional hardware will be supplied if needed. Basic code for a transmitter$/$relay$/$receiver will be supplied.

Basic system completion:

$.$ User interface that enables messages to be transmitted and received

$.$ Transmit$/$receive node that enables messages to be transmitted$/$received

$.$ Relay node that forwards messages

$.$ Messages are to be encrypted using a stream cipher

$.$ Password hard coded in user interface on laptop

$.$ Identity of sender included in message

Stretch goals $(1)($All students$)$

$.$ Password management subsystem where password is stored on host

$.$ Interface to update password

$.$ Password stored as hash

Stretch goals $(1)($Cybersecurity students, optional for Network Systems students$)$

$.$ Authentication of message source

$.$ Encryption key based on password

$.$ Whole message encrypted and decrypted at relays

$.$ Encryption key stored in non$-$volatile memory in Arduino

Stretch goals $(2)($Network Systems students, optional for Cyberscurity students$)$

$.$ Energy conservation through duty cycle reduction

$.$ Energy conservation through adaptive reduction in transmit power

Super stretch goal $($probably too ambitious$)$:

$.$ System coded on an industrial grade STM$32$ card

How to enable stream cipher and encrypt & decrypt the communication at each relay and how to store the encryption key in the non$-$volatile memory$$in$$Arduino$?$