How to jam without getting caught: Analysis and empirical study of stealthy periodic jamming

Abstract

Despite the widespread commercial use of spread spectrum technology, advanced algorithms and modern hardware capabilities still allows efficient denial-of-service attacks against wireless communication systems using jamming. Much of the recent work on jamming mitigation has focused on how to adjust the transmitter-receiver system once a jamming attack has been detected. However, characterizing the detectability of certain classes of jamming attacks remains a largely unstudied problem. We aim to narrow this gap by analyzing the effect of a class of periodic jamming attacks on the attack detection metrics of packet delivery ratio (PDR) and received signal strength (RSS). We show that a well-designed jamming signal can effectively defeat RSS-based detection while causing a significant and often devastating reduction in PDR, demonstrating that RSS-based detection is insufficient. We further evaluate our claims through implementation of a periodic jammer using a wide range of signal parameters against a transmitter-receiver pair communicating using IEEE 802.15.4, demonstrating the validity of our analytical claims.