Short paper: reactive jamming in wireless networks: how realistic is the threat?

  • Authors:

  • Matthias Wilhelm;Ivan Martinovic;Jens B. Schmitt;Vincent Lenders

  • Affiliations:

  • TU Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany;TU Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany;TU Kaiserslautern, Kaiserslautern, Germany;Armasuisse, Thun, Switzerland

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the fourth ACM conference on Wireless network security
  • Year:
  • 2011

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Abstract

In this work, we take on the role of a wireless adversary and investigate one of its most powerful tools---radio frequency jamming. Although different jammer designs are discussed in the literature, reactive jamming, i.e., targeting only packets that are already on the air, is generally recognized as a stepping stone in implementing optimal jamming strategies. The reason is that, while destroying only selected packets, the adversary minimizes its risk of being detected. One might hope for reactive jamming to be too challenging or uneconomical for an attacker to conceive and implement due to its strict real-time requirements. Yet, in this work we disillusion from such hopes as we demonstrate that flexible and reliable software-defined reactive jamming is feasible by designing and implementing a reactive jammer against IEEE 802.15.4 networks. First, we identify the causes of loss at the physical layer of 802.15.4 and show how to achieve the best performance for reactive jamming. Then, we apply these insights to our USRP2-based reactive jamming prototype, enabling a classification of transmissions in real-time, and reliable and selective jamming. The prototype achieves a reaction time in the order of microseconds, a high precision (such as targeting individual symbols), and a 97.6% jamming rate in realistic indoor scenarios for a single reactive jammer, and over 99.9% for two concurrent jammers.