Reactive Jamming and Attack Mitigation over Cross-Technology Communication Links

Abstract

Recently, Cross-Technology Communication (CTC), allowing the direct communication among heterogeneous devices with incompatible physical layers, has attracted much research attention. Many efficient CTC protocols have been proposed to demonstrate its promise in IoT applications. However, the applications built upon CTC will be significantly impaired when CTC suffers from malicious attacks such as jamming or sniffing. In this article, we implement a reactive jamming system, JamCloak, that can attack most existing CTC protocols. To this end, we first propose a taxonomy of the existing CTC protocols. Then based on the taxonomy, we extract essential features to train a CTC detection model, and estimate the parameters that can efficiently jam CTC links. Experimental results show that JamCloak consistently achieves 94.7% of classification accuracy on average in both Line-of-Sight and Non-Line-of-Sight scenarios. We also apply JamCloak to attack three existing CTC protocols: WiZig, Esense and EMF. Results show that JamCloak can significantly reduce PDR (packet delivery ratio) by 80.8% on average in practical environments. In the meantime, JamCloak’s jamming gain is more than 1.78× higher than the existing reactive jammer. In addition, we propose a practical countermeasure against reactive jamming attacks over CTC links like JamCloak. Results show that our approach significantly improves the jamming detection accuracy by 91.2% on average than the existing approach, and effectively decreases the reduction in packet delivery ratio to 1.7%.

BBAD: Blockchain-Backed Assault Detection for Cyber Physical Systems

“…Once such signals are detected, the attacker rapidly responds by transmitting interference or noise over the channel. This interference overwhelms legitimate signals, rendering them unreadable or causing them to be misinterpreted by receiving devices [26]. Reactive jamming attacks often leverage the dynamic nature of wireless networks, where the attacker can effectively identify communication patterns, frequencies, and timing to disrupt transmissions [27].…”

“…Characteristics/Features Limitations [26] Reactive Jamming Frequency hopping, random time intervals Limited effectiveness [30] Continuous Wave Jamming Continuous interference signal, signal strength modulation Continuous interference signal hinders detection [31] Reactive Jamming Dynamic power levels, spread spectrum modulation Real-time detection challenges [32] Sweep Jamming Wideband jamming, frequency agility Sweep jamming across frequencies is hard to detect.…”

Cross-Technology Communication for Heterogeneous Wireless Devices Through Symbol-Level Energy Modulation

“…Recent years have seen numerous research works on CTC between heterogenous devices, such as CTC between WiFi and ZigBee [1], [2], [8], [10], [14]- [20], between WiFi and Bluetooth [21], [22], between ZigBee and Bluetooth [23], [24], between LTE and ZigBee [25], between LoRa and ZigBee [26], between LoRa and Bluetooth [27], and between RFID and WiFi [28]. Some researchers have further analyzed other problems of the CTC system, such as attack [29], [30] and network throughput improvement [31], [32]. This paper focuses on WiFi to ZigBee CTC design, and the previous works mainly fall into two categories: physical-layer CTC and PLEM.…”

Cross-Technology Communication for the Internet of Things: A Survey

“…CTC opens a new direction which enables direct communication among heterogeneous wireless devices [58][59][60][61]. The ability to communicate with devices of different technologies avoids the unnecessary hardware cost and communication delay, compared to the indirect solutions based on a multi-radio gateway [54].…”