Performance impact of asynchronous off-tone jamming attacks against OFDM

Shahriar, Chowdhury; Sodagari, Shabnam; McGwier, Robert; Clancy, T. Charles

doi:10.1109/icc.2013.6654850

Cited by 19 publications

(16 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…In contrast to previous attacks on the frame preamble, ours in essence does not aim at necessarily causing ICI. It is also different from the attacks in [7], [9], [10] in that it is channel-independent and energy-efficient, i.e., only a small portion of the preamble is jammed irrespective of the jammer's location. This short-lived attack lasts for less than 3 µs per frame (equivalent to, for example, about 0.5% of 802.11a's maximum frame duration when the data rate is at its highest value).…”

Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 96%

“…A few jamming schemes have been proposed in the literature (e.g., [7], [9], [10]) with the goal of inflicting ICI. Phase warping and differential scrambling attacks [10] consider the preamble structure of Schmidl and Cox [15], which is different from the one used in 802.11 OFDM-based standards, and in essence try to alter preamble symbols in a heuristic fashion without providing any success guarantees.…”

Section: Frequency Offset Estimation Attacksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Gummadi et al [9] showed the vulnerability of 802.11a clock (frequency) synchronization to a certain narrow-band jamming pattern that interferes with the entire preamble. In [7] the jammer transmits multiple asynchronous subcarriers to cause ICI in an OFDM symbol. These attacks may fail if robust ECC, interleaving methods, or additional FO estimation mechanisms are employed at the Rx.…”

Section: Frequency Offset Estimation Attacksmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Simple barrage jamming targets the entire spectrum/tones and corrupts more bits than the more power efficient but less destructive partial band, single-and multi-tone jamming [7], [24]. Asynchronous off-tone jamming attacks exploit the uncompensated FO between Eve and Bob to transmit one or multiple subcarriers that will be received between some of the data subcarriers [7]. This creates significant ICI for those subcarriers.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 3 more Smart Citations

Swift Jamming Attack on Frequency Offset Estimation: The Achilles’ Heel of OFDM Systems

Rahbari

Krunz

Lazos

2016

IEEE Trans. on Mobile Comput.

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Frequency offset (FO) refers to the difference in the operating frequencies of two radio oscillators. Failure to compensate for the FO may lead to decoding errors, particularly in OFDM systems. To correct the FO, wireless standards append a publicly known preamble to every frame before transmission. In this paper, we demonstrate how an adversary can exploit the known preamble structure of OFDM-based wireless systems, particularly IEEE802.11a/g/n/ac, to launch a very stealth (low energy/duty cycle) reactive jamming attack against the FO estimation mechanism. In this attack, the adversary quickly detects a transmitted OFDM frame and subsequently jams a tiny part of the preamble that is used for FO estimation at the legitimate receiver. By optimizing the energy and structure of the jamming signal and accounting for frame detection timing errors and unknown channel parameters, we empirically show that the adversary can induce a bit error rate close to 0.5, making the transmission practically irrecoverable. Such vulnerability to FO jamming exists even when the frame is shielded by efficient channel coding. We evaluate the FO estimation attack through simulations and USRP experimentation. We also propose three approaches to mitigate such an attack.

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Section: Contributionsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Section: Frequency Offset Estimation Attacksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Frequency Offset Estimation Attacksmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Swift Jamming Attack on Frequency Offset Estimation: The Achilles’ Heel of OFDM Systems

Rahbari

Krunz

Lazos

2016

IEEE Trans. on Mobile Comput.

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“…As previously mentioned, [3]-along with [12,13]-all highlight security flaws inherent to OFDM systems. A good deal of work has been performed on analyzing and mitigating the impact that interference has on OFDM acquisition [14][15][16][17][18].…”

Section: Orthogonal Frequency-division Multiplexing Interference and mentioning

confidence: 99%

Physical layer orthogonal frequency‐division multiplexing acquisition and timing synchronization security

Pan

Clancy

McGwier

2014

Wireless Communications

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Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing (OFDM) has become the manifest modulation choice for 4G standards. Timing acquisition and carrier frequency offset synchronization are prerequisite to OFDM demodulation and must be performed often. Most of the OFDM methods for synchronization were not designed with security in mind. In particular, we analyze the performance of a maximum likelihood synchronization estimator against highly correlated jamming attacks. We present a series of attacks against OFDM timing acquisition: preamble whitening, the false preamble attack, preamble warping, and preamble nulling.The performance of OFDM synchronization turns out to be very poor against these attacks, and a number of mitigation strategies and security improvements are discussed.

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Rolling preambles: Mitigating stealthy FO estimation attacks in OFDM-based 802.11 systems

Rahbari

Krunz

2016

2016 IEEE Conference on Communications and Network Security (CNS)

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Performance impact of asynchronous off-tone jamming attacks against OFDM

Cited by 19 publications

References 7 publications

Swift Jamming Attack on Frequency Offset Estimation: The Achilles’ Heel of OFDM Systems

Swift Jamming Attack on Frequency Offset Estimation: The Achilles’ Heel of OFDM Systems

Physical layer orthogonal frequency‐division multiplexing acquisition and timing synchronization security

Rolling preambles: Mitigating stealthy FO estimation attacks in OFDM-based 802.11 systems

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