A Novel Method for Preventing Selective Jamming Attacks

The wireless medium leaves it vulnerable to intentional interference attacks, typically referred to as jam- ming. This intentional interference with wireless transmissions can be used as a launch pad for mounting DoS attacks on wireless networks. Typically, jamming bas been addressed under an external threat model. The internal knowledge of protocol specifications and network secrets can launch low-effort jamming attacks that are difficult to detect and counter. Here we find the problem of selective jamming attacks in wireless networks. We illustrate the advantages of selective jamming in terms of network performance degradation and adversary effort by presenting two case studies; a selective attack on TCP and one on rout- ing. An intuitive solution to selective jamming would be the encryption of transmitted packets (including headers) with a static key. However, for broadcast communications, this static decryption key must be known to all intended receivers and hence, is susceptible to compromise. Moreover, even if the encryption key of a hiding scheme were to remain secret, the static portions of a transmitted packet could potentially lead to packet classification. We analyse the security of our methods and evaluate their computational and communication overhead.