Randomized Differential DSSS: Jamming-Resistant Wireless Broadcast Communication

Abstract—Jamming resistance is crucial for applications where reliable wireless communication is required. Spread spectrum techniques such as Frequency Hopping Spread Spectrum (FHSS) and Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS) have been used as countermeasures against jamming attacks. Traditional antijamming techniques require that senders and receivers share a secret key in order to communicate with each other. However, such a requirement prevents these techniques from being effective for anti-jamming broadcast communication, where a jammer may learn the shared key from a compromised or malicious receiver and disrupt the reception at normal receivers. In this paper, we propose a Randomized Differential DSSS (RD-DSSS) scheme to achieve anti-jamming broadcast communication without shared keys. RD-DSSS encodes each bit of data using the correlation of unpredictable spreading codes. Specifically, bit “0 ” is encoded using two different spreading codes, which have low correlation with each other, while bit “1 ” is encoded using two identical spreading codes, which have high correlation. To defeat reactive jamming attacks, RD-DSSS uses multiple spreading code sequences to spread each message and rearranges the spread output before transmitting it. Our theoretical analysis and simulation results show that RD-DSSS can effectively defeat jamming attacks for anti-jamming broadcast communication without shared keys. I

REBUF: Jam Resistant BBC based Uncoordinated Frequency Division

One of the central tenants of information security is availability. One common form of attack against the availability of information in wireless networks is jamming. Currently, the most common techniques to provide jam-resistant communication, such as frequency-hopping spread spectrum (FHSS), are based on the use of a symmetric shared secret. However, there are theoretical approaches to jam resistance without a pre-shared secret. One theoretical approach using concurrent codes, called the BBC algorithm, was developed at the United States Air Force Academy. We developed and tested the effectiveness of REBUF, a Jam Resistant BBC based Uncoordinated Frequency Division Multiplexing (FDM) system. REBUF is the first known implementation of the BBC algorithm in a simultaneous frequency division multiplexing system. The contributions of this paper include: demonstrating the practical use of a BBC based FDM system, the ability of such a system to jam traditional orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) systems, and the resilience of such a system to some common forms of jamming

On the Security of the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast Protocol

Automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) is the communications protocol currently being rolled out as part of next generation air transportation systems. As the heart of modern air traffic control, it will play an essential role in the protection of two billion passengers per year, besides being crucial to many other interest groups in aviation. The inherent lack of security measures in the ADS-B protocol has long been a topic in both the aviation circles and in the academic community. Due to recently published proof-of-concept attacks, the topic is becoming ever more pressing, especially with the deadline for mandatory implementation in most airspaces fast approaching. This survey first summarizes the attacks and problems that have been reported in relation to ADS-B security. Thereafter, it surveys both the theoretical and practical efforts which have been previously conducted concerning these issues, including possible countermeasures. In addition, the survey seeks to go beyond the current state of the art and gives a detailed assessment of security measures which have been developed more generally for related wireless networks such as sensor networks and vehicular ad hoc networks, including a taxonomy of all considered approaches.Comment: Survey, 22 Pages, 21 Figure

Enabling Self-healing Smart Grid Through Jamming Resilient Local Controller Switching

A key component of a smart grid is its ability to collect useful information from a power grid for enabling control centers to estimate the current states of the power grid. Such information can be delivered to the control centers via wireless or wired networks. It is envisioned that wireless technology will be widely used for local-area communication subsystems in the smart grid (e.g., in distribution networks). However, various attacks with serious impact can be launched in wireless networks such as channel jamming attacks and denial-of-service attacks. In particular, jamming attacks can cause significant damages to power grids, e.g., delayed delivery of time-critical messages can prevent control centers from properly controlling the outputs of generators to match load demands. In this paper, a communication subsystem with enhanced self-healing capability in the presence of jamming is designed via intelligent local controller switching while integrating a retransmission mechanism. The proposed framework allows sufficient readings from smart meters to be continuously collected by various local controllers to estimate the states of a power grid under various attack scenarios. The jamming probability is also analyzed considering the impact of jammer power and shadowing effects. In addition, guidelines on optimal placement of local controllers to ensure effective switching of smart meters under jamming are provided. Via theoretical, experimental and simulation studies, it is demonstrated that our proposed system is effective in maintaining communications between smart meters and local controllers even when multiple jammers are present in the network

Anti-jamming communication in cognitive radio networks with unknown channel Statistics

Abstract-Recently, many opportunistic spectrum sensing and access protocols have been proposed for cognitive radio networks (CRNs). For achieving optimized spectrum usage, existing solutions model the spectrum sensing and access problem as a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) and assume that the information states and/or the primary users' (PUs) traffic statistics are known a priori to the secondary users (SUs). While theoretically sound, these existing approaches may not be effective in practice due to two main concerns. First, the assumptions they made are not practical, as before the communication starts, PUs' traffic statistics may not be readily available to the SUs. Secondly and more seriously, existing approaches are extremely vulnerable to malicious jamming attacks. A cognitive attacker can always jam the channels to be accessed by leveraging the same statistic information and stochastic dynamic decision making process that the SUs would follow. To address the above concerns, we formulate the problem of anti-jamming multichannel access in CRNs and solve it as a non-stochastic multiarmed bandit (NS-MAB) problem, where the secondary sender and receiver adaptively choose their arms (i.e., sending and receiving channels) to operate. The proposed protocol enables them to hop to the same set of channels with high probability in the presence of jamming. We analytically show the convergence of the learning algorithms, i.e., the performance difference between the secondary sender and receiver's optimal strategies is no more than O( T n ln n). Extensive simulations are conducted to validate the theoretical analysis and show that the proposed protocol is highly resilient to various jamming attacks