Run Away If You Can: Persistent Jamming Attacks against Channel Hopping Wi-Fi Devices in Dense Networks

Because of the popularity of wireless technology, jamming attack is one of the most critical issues in wireless networks. Wireless jamming attack is one type of denial-of-service attacks where attackers send malicious messages or signal on a legitimate channel by causing intentional interference in the network. In order to avoid jamming attacks, various jamming defense schemes have been proposed. One of the popular methods is a channel-hopping scheme. However, the main challenge of this method is generating a common channel number between the users and the access point without leaking that information to the jammer. We propose a new channel-hopping scheme where the access point shares a separate key with each user to isolate the damage on the network when a key has been compromised, while maintaining high throughput and fairness. We evaluate the proposed scheme through experiment on a test bed.

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Novel channel-hopping pattern-based wireless IoT networks in smart cities for reducing multi-access interference and jamming attacks

EURASIP Journal on Wireless Communications and Networking ◽

10.1186/s13638-021-02029-8 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 2021 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Yiming Liu ◽

Qi Zeng ◽

Yue Zhao ◽

Kaijun Wu ◽

Yao Hao

Keyword(s):

Data Exchange ◽

Wireless Local Area Network ◽

Local Area Network ◽

Smart Cities ◽

Local Area ◽

Mutual Interference ◽

Area Network ◽

Jamming Attacks ◽

Channel Hopping ◽

Multi Access

AbstractIn smart cities, the Internet-of-Thing (IoT) provides an enabling communication infrastructure to support tremendous amount of data exchange. Most IoT applications, e.g., wireless local area network, Bluetooth and so forth, utilize the channel-hopping scheme to suppress the transmission security threats. In this paper, to reduce the mutual interference and external jamming attacks, multiple novel channel-hopping patterns, i.e., traditional no-hit-zone (NHZ) hopping pattern and generalized NHZ hopping pattern, are introduced to suit to IoT networks. Particularly the design of probabilistic hopping pattern is first proposed, which has the various usage probabilities with regard to various channels. The properties of these hopping patterns are investigated by the step-to-step examples. Then, the error-rate performance of the multi-node IoT systems adopting these hopping patterns in the presence of jamming attacks is comprehensively analyzed. The extensive simulations show that the traditional/generalized NHZ hopping patterns are in favor of combating the mutual interference but with the limited capability of reducing jamming attacks, while the probabilistic hopping pattern possesses the opposite feature, that is, it has the predominant merit in suppressing jamming attacks. Thus, the novel channel-hopping pattern-based IoT could provide the secure transmission for communication applications in smart cities. Note that, as the physical-layer security technique, the channel-hopping patterns investigated in this paper are convenient to integrate with the security policies implemented in upper layers (e.g., encryption, authentication and so forth).

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Asynchronous Channel-Hopping Scheme under Jamming Attacks

Mobile Information Systems ◽

10.1155/2018/5032934 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 2018 ◽

pp. 1-9

Author(s):

Yongchul Kim ◽

Young-Hyun Oh ◽

Jungho Kang

Keyword(s):

Cognitive Radio ◽

Time Synchronization ◽

Radio Networks ◽

Success Rates ◽

Jamming Attacks ◽

Secondary Users ◽

Jamming Attack ◽

Channel Hopping ◽

Communication Links ◽

Blind Rendezvous

Cognitive radio networks (CRNs) are considered an attractive technology to mitigate inefficiency in the usage of licensed spectrum. CRNs allow the secondary users (SUs) to access the unused licensed spectrum and use a blind rendezvous process to establish communication links between SUs. In particular, quorum-based channel-hopping (CH) schemes have been studied recently to provide guaranteed blind rendezvous in decentralized CRNs without using global time synchronization. However, these schemes remain vulnerable to jamming attacks. In this paper, we first analyze the limitations of quorum-based rendezvous schemes called asynchronous channel hopping (ACH). Then, we introduce a novel sequence sensing jamming attack (SSJA) model in which a sophisticated jammer can dramatically reduce the rendezvous success rates of ACH schemes. In addition, we propose a fast and robust asynchronous rendezvous scheme (FRARS) that can significantly enhance robustness under jamming attacks. Our numerical results demonstrate that the performance of the proposed scheme vastly outperforms the ACH scheme when there are security concerns about a sequence sensing jammer.

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