Efficient jamming attacks in Wi-Fi networks based on legacy short training field

Abstract

In some specific confidential occasions where Wi-Fi communication needs to be completely disabled, the interference device needs to meet the requirements of energy saving, portability, and long-distance interference. Motivated by this issue, we present and evaluate Legacy Short Training Field (L-STF) jamming attack, whereby a sender device determines the channel busy despite good channel conditions. In an L-STF attack, the attacker can generate L-STF signals and send signals continuously on the target channel. We implement the L-STF jamming attack on an SDR platform and evaluate the effectiveness through PSR metrics, we also test the energy efficiency on six Wi-Fi devices from different manufacturers. The result shows that sending L-STF signals within a fixed time interval under appropriate transmit power can disable Wi-Fi communication between devices. For all tested Wi-Fi devices, the attacker can disturb communication when jammer signals are about 40 times weaker than the legitimate signals. Together, L-STF jamming can block Wi-Fi communication effectively and energy-efficiently with simple software and hardware requirements.

A Torpor-based Enhanced Security Model for CSMA/CA Protocol in Wireless Networks

“…In recent times, a jamming detection attack [12] was designed based on machine learning algorithms for vehicular networks [13]. Study [12] investigated the use of hidden rules and how it affects the observation changes under a reactive jamming attack while the latter classified the different jamming attacks based on the techniques employed by the attackers [14]. The two models' performances were good but synthetic data were used, and the analysis of correlation or deviation from existing standard data for such an experiment was not presented.…”