Visible to the public Effective Wireless Communication Architecture for Resisting Jamming Attacks

TitleEffective Wireless Communication Architecture for Resisting Jamming Attacks
Publication TypeJournal Article
Year of Publication2020
AuthorsAlshawi, Amany, Satam, Pratik, Almoualem, Firas, Hariri, Salim
JournalIEEE Access
Volume8
Pagination176691–176703
ISSN2169-3536
KeywordsCommunication system security, Computer architecture, Computer crime, denial of service (dos), jamming, jamming attack, pubcrawl, resilience, Resiliency, Resilient Communication System, Resilient Security Architectures, software defined radio, software radio, Wireless communication
AbstractOver 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.
NotesConference Name: IEEE Access
DOI10.1109/ACCESS.2020.3027325
Citation Keyalshawi_effective_2020