Towards Securing LoRaWAN ABP Communication System

Hassan N. Noura

1,2

, Ola Salman

, Tarif Hatoum

, Mohammad Malli

and Ali Chehab

American University of Beirut, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Lebanon

Arab Open University, Department of Computer Sciences, Beirut, Lebanon

Keywords:

IoT, LoRaWAN, ABP, OTAA, Security Attack, Lightweight Security Solution.

Abstract:

A large number of power-constrained devices will be connected to the Internet of Things (IoT). Deployed

in large areas, the battery-powered IoT devices call for power efﬁcient and long range communication tech-

nologies. Consequently, the Low Power Wide Area Networks(LPWAN) were devoted to being the key IoT

enablers. In this context, LoRaWAN, an LPWAN technology, is one of the main IoT communication proto-

cols candidates. However, LoRaWAN suffers from different security and privacy threats. These threats lead

to several availability, authentication, and privacy attacks. In this paper, we present efﬁcient countermeasures

against two well-known ABP attacks (eavesdropping and replay). The proposed solution aims at making LoRa

ABP end-devices safer, more secure and more reliable. In fact, the proposed solution is based on the dynamic

key derivation scheme. We presented two variants of dynamic key derivation: counter-based and channel

information-based. A set of security and performance tests shows that the proposed countermeasures present

low overhead in terms of computation and communication resources with a high level of security.

1 GENERAL DESCRIPTION

Recently, the LoRaWAN technology is presented as

key enabler for the IoT applications that require the

transmission and reception of a a small amount of

data at a low date rate within a range of few Kilo-

meters. LoRaWAN data rate varies between 0.3 to 50

kbps, depending on both range and interference. Lo-

RaWAN uses a wide bandwidth which helps in resist-

ing against interference and noise, and achieving high

power efﬁciency. Besides, it uses speciﬁc frequencies

which are 868MHZ and 900MHZ, with the transmis-

sion range being dependent on the environment.

The LoRaWAN architecture is based on the star

topology as shown in Figure 1. The IoT devices

are connected to the LoRaWAN end-devices (EDs),

which are directly connected to one (or more) gate-

way(s). Each gateway (GW) is connected to the net-

work server(NS), which can be connected to one or

more application servers(AS). In fact, the connection

between LoRaWAN EDs and GWs is a LoRaWAN

communication, whilst the connection between the

GW and the AS is a traditional IP connection.

Mainly, an ED can be connected to LoRaWAN by

using one of two activation modes, that can be Over-

The-Air-Activation (OTAA) or Activation by Person-

alization (ABP). After activation, the EDs commu-

nicate the messages, that are authenticated and en-

crypted, by using a network key NwSKey and applica-

tion key AppSKey, respectively with the NS. The NS

knows the NwSKey of all EDs, while the AS knows

the AppSKey of all EDs. However, the difference be-

tween the ABP and the OTAA is that in ABP, all the

secret keys and identiﬁers are static, and they are all

allocated at the ED. In addition, with ABP, the EDs

are connected to the NS directly without any request.

However, in OTAA, a join procedure is mandatory

for the ED to connect to the network. In addition,

in OTAA, the session keys are updated for each new

session.

1.1 Problem Formulation

In LoRaWAN v1.1, new security enhancements are

introduced. However, given that the root keys are

static and the identiﬁers (e.g. JoinUI, DevNonce, etc.)

used to generate the session keys are transmitted in

plaintext, side channel and node capture attacks are

still possible. Thus, both LoRaWAN v1.0 and v1.1

suffer from availability, integrity and conﬁdentiality

attacks in both ABP and OTAA activation modes (El-

defrawy et al., 2019). In this paper, we will focus on

the ABP eavesdropping and replay attacks.

1.2 Motivation

LoRaWAN is a wireless technology that permits the

connection of constrained IoT devices. These IoT de-

440

Noura, H., Salman, O., Hatoum, T., Malli, M. and Chehab, A.

Towards Securing LoRaWAN ABP Communication System.

DOI: 10.5220/0009561104400447

In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science (CLOSER 2020), pages 440-447

ISBN: 978-989-758-424-4

Figure 1: LoRaWAN Topology.

vices include sensors and embedded devices in auto-

mobiles, homes, roads and bridges, appliances and

farms equipment. These devices generate different

types of data, changing the way the data is produced

and experienced. IoT obviously represents a great op-

portunity for advances in data analysis (Verma et al.,

2017). The collection and processing of data from IoT

devices by the application servers is gaining attention,

except from a security perspective.

The security mechanism designed to protect com-

munications must provide appropriate assurances in

terms of conﬁdentiality, integrity, authentication, and

non-repudiation of information ﬂow. In fact, the IoT

security is very critical in terms of protection of data

transfer between the end-devices and the servers via

the transparent gateways. Such security problems are

related to different types of attacks which may jeop-

ardize the data transmission process between the IoT

devices and the network (Salman et al., 2018; Salman

et al., 2015; Salman et al., 2017).

1.3 Contributions

This paper focuses on the design of efﬁcient coun-

termeasures against eavesdropping and replay attacks

for LoRaWAN in the ABP activation mode. The main

goal of this work is to reach high level of security with

the minimum possible resources and latency require-

ments.

A new efﬁcient, ﬂexible, lightweight and secure

dynamic key derivation algorithm is proposed for Lo-

RaWAN EDs. The strength of the proposed cipher

scheme is that it employs the dynamic key approach

and an update function that are iterated only when the

session counter reaches the maximum value. These

operations are designed to require minimum number

of operations and to preserve the desirable crypto-

graphic performance. To accomplish this objective,

the dynamic key approach is employed, and dynamic

network and application keys are produced for each

reset operation. The network and application dynamic

keys depend on the static network key along with the

application secret key, in addition to a reset counter

which is incremented by one for each reset. The dy-

namic key approach makes the collected trafﬁc non-

useful in the next reset session, which consequently

prevents the replay or eavesdropping attacks. In ad-

dition, the proposed solution ensures a good crypto-

graphic performance while requiring a low computa-

tional complexity.

1.4 Organization

The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In Sec-

tion 2, we review the previous work proposing cryp-

tographic solutions to enhance the LoRaWAN secu-

rity. The different classes of LoRaWAN EDs in addi-

tion to the ABP activation mode are described in Sec-

tion 3. In Section 4, LoRaWAN security attacks are

explained and illustrated. Then, in Section 5, the two

variants of the proposed countermeasure, which is

based on a dynamic key derivation algorithm, are de-

scribed. Then, a security analysis is included in Sec-

tion 6 to show the robustness of the proposed coun-

termeasure, which makes the LoRaWAN security at-

tacks inapplicable. Moreover, the performance of the

proposed countermeasure is analysed in Section 7. Fi-

nally, the conclusions along with the directions for fu-

ture work are presented in Section 8.

2 RELATED WORK

In this section, we review the cryptographic based so-

lutions for the LoRaWAN security threats. The bit

ﬂipping attack consists of changing one bit in the ci-

phertext without decrypting it. This attack is possible

due to the use of AES in the counter mode. A solu-

tion to shufﬂe the ciphertext is proposed in (Lee et al.,

2017). A dual activation solution is proposed (Kim

and Song, 2017a). This solution consists of gener-

ating new keys Nwk

Key and App

Key to thwart the

node capture and side channel attacks. A replay attack

prevention is proposed by modifying the reset condi-

tion in (Kim and Song, 2017b). In this case, the join

procedure is performed only when the NwkSKey is

lost at the ED . Another work considering the protec-

tion of EDs from the replay attack is done in (Sung

et al., 2018). Measuring the Received Signal Strength

Indicator (RSSI) of the received join request signal,

the NS can differentiate between the user and the at-

tacker. However, this method is not reliable when the

attacker and the user are at the same distance. In ad-

dition, the LoRaWAN ED might not be at ﬁxed posi-

tion. An AES scheme for AppSKey and D-Box up-

date each k days is proposed in (Tsai et al., 2018).

Towards Securing LoRaWAN ABP Communication System

441

The proposed solution is based on a lightweight and

efﬁcient AES version. Another work that considers

the management of NwkSKey and AppSKey by in-

troducing an adaptation security layer protocol based

on Ephemeral Difﬁe–Hellman Over COSE (EDHOC)

is proposed in (Sanchez-Iborra et al., 2018). How-

ever, the considered device for performance testing

does not conform with many of the IoT constrained

devices capabilities. In (Xia et al., 2018), a key man-

agement framework based on a trusted Key Distribu-

tion Server (KDS) based scheme is proposed. Intro-

duced in (Ruotsalainen and Grebeniuk, 2018; Zhang

et al., 2018), the feasibility of secure key gener-

ation based on the wireless channel measurements

(i.e. Received Signal Strength Information (RSSI))

is conducted in (Xu et al., 2019; Xu et al., 2018).

Even though LoRaWAN v1.1 presents new security

measures that aim at enhancing the LoRaWAN se-

curity, however the conﬁdentiality attacks are still

possible. Thus, the update of the root keys used

for deriving the session keys is necessary to avoid

the session keys disclosure. For this aim, a Rabbit

cipher-stream based key derivation function is pro-

posed in (Han and Wang, 2018) to update the root

keys at the ED. In this paper, a dynamic key deriva-

tion scheme is proposed to prevent ABP replay and

conﬁdentiality attacks. Two variants of this scheme

are presented: a counter-based and a piece of channel

information-based. By using the proposed dynamic

key approach, different dynamic network and appli-

cation keys are used for each reset time. Therefore,

different keystream will be produced, since the appli-

cation key is changed and consequently different ci-

phertext will be produced. This makes the conﬁden-

tiality attacks unfeasible. In parallel, by using a dif-

ferent network key, previously received messages will

not be validated, which consequently prevents replay

attack. The choice of the convenient scheme (counter-

based or channel information-based) is based on the

ED capabilities.

3 LoRaWAN BACKGROUND

In this section, the different classes of LoRaWAN

EDs are ﬁrst presented, then we explain the ABP ac-

tivation mode. Note that Table 1 represents the nota-

tions used in this paper.

3.1 LoRaWAN End-Devices

The LoRaWAN EDs are the IoT devices connected

to the LoRa network. These devices are connected

to the LoraWAN GW and send data to the LoRa net-

Table 1: Table of Notations.

Symbol Deﬁnition

CR Coding Rate

RC Reset Counter

NwkSKey Network Secret Key

AppS Key Application Secret Key

FNwkSIntKey MAC layer network integrity key

SNwkSIntKey Network session encryption key

NwkSEncKey Forwarding network session integrity

key

SSK Static secret key

work. Being sensors that measure pressure, velocity,

humidity, temperature, vibration, etc., the LoRaWAN

EDs are divided into three classes: A, B, and C, based

on the MAC layer operation (Aras et al., 2017; Au-

gustin et al., 2016; Vangelista et al., 2015).

3.2 Activation By Personalization (ABP)

Unlike OTAA, the ABP activation mode does not in-

clude a join procedure. In this case, the ED can

send and receive messages without the need to be au-

thenticated ﬁrst by the network. However, for conﬁ-

dentiality, the messages are encrypted and authenti-

cated using session keys preloaded inside each ED. In

fact, each ED has its unique session keys NwkSKey,

and AppSKeyy. Moreover, in LoaRaWAN v1.1,

three keys are introduced which are: FNwkSIntKey,

SNwkSIntKey, and NwkSEncKey. This way, if any

ED is compromised, the security of the other EDs

communications will not be compromised. In case of

ED reset, the ED sends the ResetIndMAC command

in FOpt for all the uplink messages, and waits for the

Resetcon f command. Otherwise, the ED sends and

receives the messages.

4 LoRaWAN ATTACKS

In this section, we describe the main LoRaWAN se-

curity attacks considered in the literature. Mainly,

we have two types of attacks that we aim at defend-

ing by our proposed solution, namely the replay and

eavesdropping attacks. Note that these attacks are still

valid for LoRaWAN v1.1. In addition, given that Lo-

RaWAN v1.0 is still in use, it is important to consider

both LoRaWAN v1.0 and v1.1 vulnerabilities when

proposing a new security solution.

4.1 Eavesdropping Attack

To ensure the message conﬁdentiality, LoRaWAN

employs AES-128 in a counter mode. Thus, if two ci-

phertexts are being encrypted by the same key-stream

CLOSER 2020 - 10th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science

442

cipher (C1 = P1 ⊕ K and C2 = P2 ⊕ K), the attacker

is able to know the exclusive or (XOR) of the plain-

text messages by XORing the collected ciphertexts

(C1 ⊕C2 = P1 ⊕ P2). Thus, in the ABP mode, where

the session keys are static, when the counter is reset,

the same key-stream cipher is obtained (Tsai et al.,

2018; Salinesi et al., 2011; Kuipers, ).

Note that this attack is only possible in ABP mode,

given that in OTAA mode, the session keys are up-

dated after a counter reset. In fact, to have a full

knowledge of the communicated messages, the at-

tacker needs to know or choose one of the plaintexts

P1 or P2 (Yang et al., 2018; Mundt et al., 2018).

Therefore, the conﬁdentiality of next communication

messages is broken.

4.2 Replay Attack

The ABP replay attack consists of replaying old pack-

ets by the attacker. As the used session keys are static,

the attacker can replay the packets when the counter is

reset to 0 (Sung et al., 2018). In this case, the attacker

stores the uplink messages and replay them when the

counter is reset (Tomasin et al., 2017; Salinesi et al.,

2011; Na et al., 2017; Kim and Song, 2017b).

5 PROPOSED DYNAMIC KEY

BASED SOLUTION

In order to defend against replay attacks, some sim-

ple countermeasures exist such as the use of time-

stamps, onetime passwords, and challenge-response

cryptography. Nevertheless, these schemes are in-

convenient, considering the vulnerabilities to which

challenge-response protocols are susceptible to. In

addition, to defend the key related attacks, key dy-

namicity is essential to limit the attack inﬂuence and

the attacker capabilities.

The LoRaWAN speciﬁcation explicitly warns de-

velopers about generating secure network and appli-

cation keys: Each device should have a unique

set of ”NwkSKey” and ”AppSKey”. Compromis-

ing the keys of one ED should not compromise

the security of the communications of other de-

vices (Sisinni et al., 2018). The process to build those

keys cannot be derived in any way from any publicly

available information such as the Node address.

The characteristics of the proposed countermea-

sure are listed in the following:

• Lightweight Countermeasure Scheme: The

proposed scheme uses a minimum number of it-

erations (operations), and it is only applied during

the reset operation. Our aim is to make the so-

lution lightweight towards reducing the required

memory and power consumption.

• Flexibility: The proposed countermeasure is ﬂex-

ible, in which we have two simple countermea-

sure variants(depends on LoRaWAN ED class).

The computational complexity of the ﬁrst variant

is low compared to the second one, while the se-

curity level of the second one is higher compared

to the ﬁrst one

• Simple Hardware and Software Implementa-

tions: The proposed key derivation function uses

logical exclusive OR and can also use any secure

hash function (second variant), which renders the

corresponding hardware and software implemen-

tations of the proposed key derivation scheme to

be simple and efﬁcient.

• Dynamic Key Approach: In contrast to the ex-

isting cipher solutions, the proposed approach is

based on dynamic keys, which is variable and

changes in a pseudo-random manner after each

new reset operation. In addition, changing the

dynamic key produces different ciphertext and

MIC(s). The dynamic nature of the proposed ci-

pher provides high robustness against any kind of

attacks (Naoui et al., 2016).

• High Level of Security.

5.1 Counter-based Countermeasure

The produced dynamic key depends on the static se-

cret keys that are embedded in the ED, in addition to

employing a reset counter number CR. The dynamic

network and application secret keys for EDs of class

A and B is presented in the following:

DSK = SSK ⊕ CR (1)

In fact, the proposed technique mixes (exclusive or)

the static secret key (SSK) with the number of ses-

sions CR towards producing the dynamic secret keys

(DSK). The update of the dynamic secret keys for

class C EDs is presented in the following:

DSK = h(SS K ⊕CR) (2)

where h represents any secure cryptographic hash

function, such as SHA-512.

Each corresponding output (mixing between static

key and counter reset) is hashed to produce a dynamic

session key (DSK) for each new reset session as de-

scribed in the previous equation.

Note that the SSK and the corresponding DSK, as

shown in Figure 2, represent the static session keys

and their corresponding dynamic keys, respectively.

Towards Securing LoRaWAN ABP Communication System

443

These session keys include: NwkSKey, AppSKey,

FNwkSIntKey, SNwkSIntKey, and NwkSEncKey.

However, the difference between the previous dy-

namic key derivation functions and our proposed so-

lution is that we use a secure cryptographic hash func-

tion for EDs of class C, which have better characteris-

tics in terms of resources and computation compared

to EDs of class A and B.

(a) (b)

Figure 2: The proposed Counter-based dynamic key deriva-

tion scheme for LoRaWAN EDs: (a) for class A and B, and

(b) for Class C, respectively.SSK represents the static net-

work or application key, while DSK represents the dynamic

network or application keys.

5.2 Physical Channel based

Countermeasure

The main motivation behind this variant is to avoid

the limitations of key-less/static key techniques and

beneﬁt from the dynamic and random nature of the

physical channel. This solution ensures the desired

dynamic key approach by using channel parameters,

which can lead to enhance the security level.

Figure 3 illustrates the proposed key derivation

function that takes as inputs a network or applica-

tion secret key SSK and a nonce N

, which is updated

from the physical channel parameters for every new

session. In fact, the Nonce N

can be obtained by

combining several channel parameters (Noura et al.,

2018) (such as Channel State Information (CSI) and

Received Signal Strength (RSS)). These parameters

change in a dynamic manner, and we assume that a

good synchronization is realized between emitter and

transmitter, which allows each entity to derive the

same nonce separately (Noura et al., 2019b; Noura

et al., 2019c; Noura et al., 2019a). Moreover, in order

to generate the nonce, channel parameters (real num-

bers), such as the CSI and RSS, are ﬁrst converted

to a sequence of bytes, then hashed to obtain the re-

quired nonce. The hash function is introduced here

towards reaching a high nonce sensitivity against any

slight change in channel parameters. The secure hash

function (SHA − 512) is selected for this step, since

it possesses the best and most desirable cryptographic

hash properties (strong collision).

Then, the nonce is XORed with the static network

and application secret keys to derive the dynamic net-

work and application keys. It is important to generate

a new nonce for each new session.

Figure 3: Proposed dynamic key generation steps.

Figure 4: Variation of the dynamic key sensitivity in func-

tion of reset counter (RC) by using the proposed counter-

measure for LoRaWAN end-devices classes C (uses SHA-

256).

6 SECURITY ANALYSIS

In this section, the security level of the proposed key

derivation scheme is analyzed and assessed. More

speciﬁcally, the produced update network and appli-

cations keys should reach a high level of randomness,

uniformity, and sensitivity. Randomness and unifor-

mity tests in addition to sensitivity tests are applied to

evaluate the security level of the proposed solution.

6.1 Dynamic Key Sensitivity

In this test, the sensitivity of the secret key is anal-

ysed, in order to assess the proposed scheme’s robust-

CLOSER 2020 - 10th International Conference on Cloud Computing and Services Science

444

(a)

(b)

Figure 5: Variation of the ciphertext and MIC sensitivity in

function of reset counter (RC) by using the proposed coun-

termeasure for LoRaWAN end-devices classes A and B.

ness against weak keys and related key attacks. More

speciﬁcally, a one bit change in the network or appli-

cation secret key should result in a 50% different set

of ciphertext or MIC, respectively. Consequently, two

(network or application) secret keys, DSK

and DSK

which differ by only one bit, are used to encrypt the

input payload. Figure 5 and 4 presents the key sensi-

tivity values corresponding to 1000 randomly gener-

ated secret keys. The presented results prove that the

key sensitivity value is always close to 50% by using

the produced dynamic network or application keys.

Indeed, the sensitivity of the dynamic secret key DSK

is calculated as follows:

KS =

∑

k=1

dec2bin(E

DSK

(P)) ⊕ dec2bin(E

DSK

(P))

(3)

where all the elements of DSK are equal to those of

DSK

, except for the Least Signiﬁcant Bit (LSB) of a

random byte, and T is the length of the secret keys (in

bits).

This result proves that the proposed countermea-

sure reaches a high level of key sensitivity, since

the obtained results are very close to the desired

value, which is 50%. Therefore, the proposed update

scheme conﬁrms its security since the required sensi-

tivity is attained.

6.2 Countermeasure Crypt-analysis

In this section, the robustness of the proposed coun-

termeasure scheme against the listed attacks is dis-

cussed and analyzed. These attacks include replay

and eavesdropping attacks. The proposed scheme is

considered public and the crypt-analyst is assumed

to have complete knowledge regarding all required

steps, but none regarding the network and application

secret keys.

The proposed solution introduces the dynamicity

by updating the network and application keys for each

new reset. In addition, the produced dynamic network

and server keys are produced by mixing the static ones

with the reset counter number or channel parameters

for LoRaWAN EDs of class A and B. This means new

key stream is produced, since dynamic application

key is used. This prevents conﬁdentiality attacks to

recover any useful information about the future mes-

sages. In parallel, a new dynamic network key will

be used, which makes previous messages of previous

sessions invalid during the current session. Therefore,

the proposed dynamic key derivation technique will

prevent replay and conﬁdentiality attacks, since AES

meets the message and key avalanche effect. In addi-

tion, a secure hash function operation such as SHA-

512(one way function) is introduced in the proposed

solution for LoRaWAN EDs of class C (high trafﬁc).

In fact, the hash function is applied on the output

of the mixed secret key with the reset counter. This

will make the produced dynamic keys different com-

pared to the static and the previous dynamic ones.

In fact, the proposed key derivation scheme presents

high collision resistance, where any slight modiﬁca-

tion in any input produces different network and ap-

plication keys. Moreover, the size of the counter ses-

sion is ﬂexible and it can be at least equals to 128 bits.

7 PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

In this section, the performance of the proposed

scheme is assessed in terms of computational com-

plexity, execution time, communication overhead, ef-

ﬁciency, transparency, and ﬂexibility.

7.1 Computational Complexity

In this paper, the proposed solution depends on one

or two simple operations, mainly exclusive or (XOR)

Towards Securing LoRaWAN ABP Communication System

445

and/or secure cryptographic hash function. As a re-

sult, the computational complexity of the proposed

countermeasure is relatively low. The computational

complexity overhead is deﬁned as the sum of process-

ing overhead in each update network and application

key update process

1. C

xor

is the overhead of the logical exclusive or

(XOR),

2. C

hash

is the overhead of one hash operation,

The overhead delay of the proposed update mecha-

nism for class A and B EDs is:

prop(A,B)

= 2 ×C

xor

(4)

The overhead delay depends of the number of packets

transmitted between two ED resets. Low overhead de-

lay is introduced for a big number of packets transmit-

ted between two resets. Therefore, it is clear that the

required delay overhead in this solution is low since

the proposed scheme requires a lower number of op-

erations. While the required overhead delay for class

C EDs is;

prop

= 2 ×C

hash

+ 2 ×C

XOR

(5)

= C

prop(A,B)

+ 2 ×C

hash

(6)

Here, it is clear that the overhead of the proposed so-

lution for class C EDs is higher compared to class A

and B EDs, since it requires two hash operations for

each reset. In terms of energy, the EDs of class C are

not power constrained, while in terms of delay, it de-

pends on their application. Let us indicate that this

cost can be acceptable if a high level of security is

necessary.

7.2 Communication Overhead

The proposed solution does not introduce any com-

munication overhead and the reset counter is updated

at the EDs. Then, network and application servers

received this information from the EDs and conse-

quently update the corresponding counter in the case

of the ﬁrst variant or receive the channel parameters

from the GW in the case of the second variant.

8 CONCLUSION

LoRaWAN has appeared in the last few years as an

efﬁcient communication technology for IoT applica-

tions. However, LoRaWAN suffers from many secu-

rity vulnerabilities and threats, which lead to attacks

against the system conﬁdentiality, integrity, authenti-

cation and availability, in addition to privacy issues.

In this paper, the proposed solution is based on a new

dynamic key derivation approach that updates the net-

work and application keys after each reset operation

for ABP end-devices. Therefore, dynamic conﬁden-

tiality and authentication keys are used for each reset

session instead of the static ones, as in the traditional

ABP operation mode. Moreover, the proposed coun-

termeasure is adapted to EDS of classes (A,B, and C).

Therefore, it is designed to reach a good balance be-

tween security and system performance. As a result,

the performed security and performance tests validate

the efﬁciency and robustness of the proposed solution.

Note that the proposed scheme can be applied also for

updating the OTAA root keys (the root key for net-

work server NwkKey and the root key for application

server AppK ey) used for deriving the dynamic session

keys.

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