Bittransfer: Mitigating Reactive Jamming in Electronic Warfare Scenarios

Abstract

Electronic Warfare (EW) scenarios contemplate powerful and stealthy jamming attacks, able to disrupt any competing wireless communication in the target area. Reactive jamming techniques are especially suitable to this aim. Indeed, by first eavesdropping on the whole radio spectrum used for communications, and then timely injecting random noise as soon as a transmission is detected, reactive jamming represents both an effective and hard-to-detect attack tool. In such a challenging EW scenario, all the solutions currently available in the literature to mitigate reactive jamming require either the deployment of specialized hardware, or the modifications of physical layer protocols-the former solution being expensive, and the latter one usually not viable when considering commercially available wireless devices. In this paper we propose BitTransfer, an anti-jamming protocol enabling wireless communications between neighboring devices even under the above-described stringent requirements and powerful attacker model. BitTransfer embeds information bits in radio activity operations, a 0 being represented by the absence of any radio activity, and a 1 by the reception of a (corrupted) packet at the receiver. To demonstrate its applicability to a wide class of commercial wireless devices, BitTransfer has been implemented using a real constrained hardware platform (the Openmote-b), released as freely available and open-source, and tested using the IEEE 802.15.4 communication technology, adopted within the Bluetooth and Zigbee 3.0 protocol stacks. When under attack by a reactive jammer, BitTransfer can transfer a message of 127 Bit in 11.17 seconds, while competing approaches simply fail. Other than being completely tunable, BitTransfer can also enjoy further improvements by simply increasing the transmission rate of the devices. Finally, its detailed design, open-source availability, robustness, and superior performance when compared against competing solutions, make it a solution of choice in challenging EW scenarios, also paving the way to further research along the highlighted directions.

A Lightweight Secure and Resilient Transmission Scheme for the Internet of Things in the Presence of a Hostile Jammer

“…It is seen that the HJ is more destructive when it is near the receiving node. As another benchmark, we investigate the resiliency of our proposed scheme when the HJ is powerful enough to fully jam (FJ) all available sub-channels [20]. This special case can be easily analyzed by substituting N j = N c , taking the first term of (7), and finally, substituting the resultant R key into (21).…”

“…This fact may limit the performance of the system. 4) The fully-jammed (FJ) scenario [20], where N j = N c ;…”

“…Beside Eves, active attackers termed as hostile jammer (HJ) may exist in wireless networks and propagate noise-like signals with the aim of degrading the communication link quality [19]. This attack may detriment the state-of-the-art IoT networks, such as mission-critical and civilian applications [20], WSNs [21], and multi-frequency IoT communications [22]. To mitigate this drawback, spread-spectrum techniques, e.g., direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) and frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS) are implemented in commercial networks [23]- [26].…”

“…• Extensive comparisons with the state-of-the-arts are provided in the paper to highlight the priority of our proposed scheme. In particular, we compare the performance of our scheme with the the traditional direct transmission (DT) [16], the fully-jammed scenario [20] as a special case, the non-frequency hopping approach [35], and the multifrequency data transmission [48].…”

Realistic Deployment of Hybrid Wireless Sensor Networks Based on ZigBee and LoRa for Search and Rescue Applications

“…However, the standard communications infrastructure may be affected too as the catastrophe occurs [13], thus making the task harder and putting the rescue team at a disadvantage unless it uses an emergency communication technology like a WSN [14]. Nevertheless, the effectiveness of a WSN is closely related to how the node deployment has been planned, i.e., the coverage and connectivity achieved when the sensory network is established [15], its reliability [16] and security [17]. Although nodes are usually easy to deploy, once the sensor network has been set up there is no alternative to adding new nodes or re-deploying the WSN if information needs to be gathered in different areas [18].…”