Biblio

Over time, the use of wireless technologies has significantly increased due to bandwidth improvements, cost-effectiveness, and ease of deployment. Owing to the ease of access to the communication medium, wireless communications and technologies are inherently vulnerable to attacks. These attacks include brute force attacks such as jamming attacks and those that target the communication protocol (Wi-Fi and Bluetooth protocols). Thus, there is a need to make wireless communication resilient and secure against attacks. Existing wireless protocols and applications have attempted to address the need to improve systems security as well as privacy. They have been highly effective in addressing privacy issues, but ineffective in addressing security threats like jamming and session hijacking attacks and other types of Denial of Service Attacks. In this article, we present an ``architecture for resilient wireless communications'' based on the concept of Moving Target Defense. To increase the difficulty of launching successful attacks and achieve resilient operation, we changed the runtime characteristics of wireless links, such as the modulation type, network address, packet size, and channel operating frequency. The architecture reduces the overhead resulting from changing channel configurations using two communication channels, in which one is used for communication, while the other acts as a standby channel. A prototype was built using Software Defined Radio to test the performance of the architecture. Experimental evaluations showed that the approach was resilient against jamming attacks. We also present a mathematical analysis to demonstrate the difficulty of performing a successful attack against our proposed architecture.

As the use of wireless technologies increases significantly due to ease of deployment, cost-effectiveness and the increase in bandwidth, there is a critical need to make the wireless communications secure, and resilient to attacks or faults (malicious or natural). Wireless communications are inherently prone to cyberattacks due to the open access to the medium. While current wireless protocols have addressed the privacy issues, they have failed to provide effective solutions against denial of service attacks, session hijacking and jamming attacks. In this paper, we present a resilient wireless communication architecture based on Moving Target Defense, and Software Defined Radios (SDRs). The approach achieves its resilient operations by randomly changing the runtime characteristics of the wireless communications channels between different wireless nodes to make it extremely difficult to succeed in launching attacks. The runtime characteristics that can be changed include packet size, network address, modulation type, and the operating frequency of the channel. In addition, the lifespan for each configuration will be random. To reduce the overhead in switching between two consecutive configurations, we use two radio channels that are selected at random from a finite set of potential channels, one will be designated as an active channel while the second acts as a standby channel. This will harden the wireless communications attacks because the attackers have no clue on what channels are currently being used to exploit existing vulnerability and launch an attack. The experimental results and evaluation show that our approach can tolerate a wide range of attacks (Jamming, DOS and session attacks) against wireless networks.