Intelligent Jamming using Software-Defined Radios on IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

Abstract

IEEE 802.11 is the most widely used standard because it guarantees high performance and low deployment cost. However, there is a vulnerability that the wireless network environment can be affected by other wireless device signals due to open channel characteristics. Therefore, various researches have been conducted on the jamming in order to interrupt the communication of the device and stop the service in IEEE 802.11.

A naive jamming attack generates a strong signal continuously, causing a signal collision at the receiving node. This kind of naive jamming attack requires a lot of energy to be constantly consumed and it can be easily detected. In this paper, we describe intelligent jamming using attack algorithms that are more efficient and more difficult to detect than naive jamming. Using software-defined radios (SDR), we implement a reactive jamming and an ACK frame jamming and evaluate performance. However, the failure of the repetitive transmission by these intelligent jamming attacks causes the transmitter to suspect the existence of the jammers. To solve this problem, we proposed a covert jamming, which is an attack that can hide the transmission failure from the transmitter and conceal the of intelligent jamming. Through simulations and experiments, we show that the covert jammer we proposed hides the existence of intelligent and disrupt wireless communication energy-efficiently.