Effects of Beacon Spoofing attacks on various LoRaWAN network devices

Internet of Things (IoT) devices increasingly support critical infrastructure and are commonly deployed over low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs). Among these, Long Range Wide Area Network (LoRaWAN) is widely adopted. While LoRaWAN v1.1 addresses many early issues, it introduces a Class B beacon dependency that can be exploited via beacon spoofing, degrading downlink availability. Prior work has demonstrated beacon spoofing on single devices, but the resilience of large LoRaWAN networks under such attacks remains underexplored. This paper presents a reproducible large-scale simulator and an empirical study across multiple network scenarios to evaluate the effect of pingSlot diversity on survivability during beacon spoofing. We formulate and test the null hypothesis that network diversity has no effect on attack outcomes. Using Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) and Beacon Delivery Ratio (BDR) as primary metrics and analysing Attack-Period behaviour, we find that higher pingSlot diversity consistently increases PDR, indicating improved resilience. Accordingly, we reject the null hypothesis and attribute the benefit to the interaction between pingSlot periodicity and pingSlot offset under desynchronisation pressure. Our simulator enables operators to evaluate policies and configurations against beacon spoofing at scale, and our findings highlight the need to harden beacon mechanisms - both within LoRaWAN and in other LPWANs that rely on unauthenticated timing signals.