Countering cross-technology jamming attack

Abstract

Internet-of-things (IoT) devices are sharing the radio frequency band (e.g., 2.4 GHz ISM band). The exponentially increasing number of IoT devices introduces potential security issues at the gateway in IoT networks. In this paper, we introduce a set of new attacks through concealed jamming - an adversary pretends to be (or compromises) a legitimate WiFi device, then sends out WiFi packets to prevent ZigBee devices' communication or collide with ZigBee's packets. By doing this, concealed jamming has the potential to severely delay the reception of ZigBee packets that may contain important information (e.g., critical health data from wearables, fire alarms, and intrusion alarms). To defend against these attacks, we designed a novel ZigBee data extraction technique that can recover ZigBee data from the ZigBee packets that were collided with WiFi packets. We extensively evaluated our design in different real-world settings. The results show that ZigBee devices (protected by our proposed methods) achieve similar performance as those that are not under the concealed jamming attack. Moreover, compared with unprotected devices, their throughput is more than 15 times higher than the unprotected one that is under concealed jamming attacks.