Mitigation of Control Channel Jamming under Node Capture Attacks

Abstract

Abstract-Availability of service in many wireless networks depends on the ability for network users to establish and maintain communication channels using control messages from base stations and other users. An adversary with knowledge of the underlying communication protocol can mount an efficient denial of service attack by jamming the communication channels used to exchange control messages. The use of spread spectrum techniques can deter an external adversary from such control channel jamming attacks. However, malicious colluding insiders or an adversary who captures or compromises system users are not deterred by spread spectrum, as they know the required spreading sequences. For the case of internal adversaries, we propose a framework for control channel access schemes using the random assignment of cryptographic keys to hide the location of control channels. We propose and evaluate metrics to quantify the probabilistic availability of service under control channel jamming by malicious or compromised users and show that the availability of service degrades gracefully as the number of colluding insiders or compromised users increases. We propose an algorithm called GUIDE for the identification of compromised users in the system based on the set of control channels that are jammed. We evaluate the estimation error using the GUIDE algorithm in terms of the false alarm and miss rates in the identification problem. We discuss various design trade-offs between robustness to control channel jamming and resource expenditure.

Swarm-based intelligent technique to prevent selective jamming attacks for dynamic topology

“…A sensor network consists of wireless ad hoc network which means that each sensor supports a multi-hop routing algorithm (quite a few nodes forwards data packets to a base station). Each node in the sensor network is equipped with a radio transceiver or wireless communication device, microcontroller and an energy source (battery) in addition to one or more sensors [2].The wireless sensor network field provides prosperous, multi-disciplinary area of research where a various tools and concepts are engaged for addressing diverse set of application. However, adopting an "al-ways-on" strategy has several disadvantages.…”

A Review of Cyber Threats and Defence Approaches in Emergency Management

“…Weak message authentication [21] Rogue messages transmitted Encryption [22,23] Control channel jamming [24,25] Loss of availability Antijamming mechanisms [24,26] Amateur Radio Fake GSM and other stations [27] Calls spoofed/intercepted No known solutions Professional Mobile Radio TETRA authentication key cloning [28] TETRA authentication process compromised No known solutions Radio location privacy attack [29] P25 Location privacy breached No known solutions Physical layer jamming [29] P25 Denial of service No known solutions Brute Force Key recovery [30] P25 authentication process compromised No known solutions…”

Compromise-Resilient Anti-jamming for Wireless Sensor Networks

“…Researchers studied jamming attacks on a broadcast control channel in [12,13]. [12] considered an inside attacker who could compromise nodes to obtain the cryptographic information such as hopping sequences.…”

“…The cluster head then updates the hopping sequences and redistributes them. Dealing with the similar problem, [13] proposed a framework for the control channel access scheme, using the random assignment of cryptographic keys to hide the location of control channels. Both the schemes, however, run in a centralized manner with the help of either cluster heads or trusted authorities.…”

“…As our first step towards addressing the insider jamming problem, in this paper, we focus on a one-hop network in which each node can directly communicate with all other nodes within one-hop range. This model is widely used and studied in recent works [3][4][5][12][13][14] and to our knowledge, no work has studied jamming in a multihop network yet.…”