JamRF: Performance Analysis, Evaluation, and Implementation of RF Jamming over Wi-Fi

Abstract

<p>Jamming attacks significantly degrade the performance of wireless communication systems and can lead to significant overhead in terms of re-transmissions and increased power consumption. Although different jamming techniques are discussed in the literature, numerous open-source implementations have used expensive equipment in the range of thousands of dollars with the exception of a few. These implementations have also tended to be partial band, and do not cover the whole available bandwidth of the system under attack. In this work, we demonstrate that flexible, reliable, and low priced software-defined radio (SDR) jamming is feasible by designing and implementing different types of jammers against IEEE 802.11n networks. First, to demonstrate the optimal jamming waveform, we present an analytical bit error rate expression of the system under attack by employing two common jamming waveforms: Gaussian noise and digitally modulated. Then, we validate this analysis through simulations using the MATLAB WLAN toolbox. Afterwards, we implement JamRF, a toolkit that employs a low-cost SDR to implement numerous types of jammers to validate the analysis. Obtained results showed that, to jam the whole 2.4GHz spectrum, a stateful-reactive jammer employing random channel hopping jamming strategy, achieves a packet loss ratio above 90%. </p>

RF Jamming Dataset: A Wireless Spectral Scan Approach for Malicious Interference Detection

“…In this section, we will first discuss the testbed design based on the jamming signal generated by the JamRF toolkit [3]. Next, we discuss how to implement the testbed design specified.…”

“…The basic idea behind the testbed is to carry out jamming based on JamRF [3] implementation of a broadband jammer that can jam a portion of the spectrum thereby disrupting or corrupting user data. Here, by employing the JamRF toolkit, we jam all the available 2.4/5GHz channels sequentially.…”

“…HackRF One is compatible with popular softwaredefined radio applications such as GNU Radio and SDR#. As described in Section II, we employ JamRF which is a jamming toolkit that implements different types of jammers and jammer strategies using HackRF and GNU radio [3].…”

“…In contrast, intentional interference refers to hostile attacks on a victim receiver that is not in defensive mode [2]. In particular, the jamming attack is an active adversary attack that transmits energy to disrupt reliable data transmission or reception, and can drastically degrade system performance [3].…”

“…In contrast to earlier efforts, we provide an experimental testbed for performing spectrum scanning using the in-built wide local area network (WLAN) interface cards (NICs) of communication devices to collect data in different environments. Furthermore, using the testbed, we employ JamRF 2 a jamming toolkit developed in [3], we synthesize different jamming scenarios to generate RF jamming dataset. Particularly, we describe the methodology used for the development of the testbed and discuss the reasons behind the choices taken during its development to facilitate future improvement in the experimental exploration of jamming dataset production based on the spectral scan.…”