Dodge-Jam: Anti-Jamming Technique for Low-Power and Lossy Wireless Networks

Abstract

Jamming is one of the most famous and powerful attacks in wireless networks, and is advancing to be more stealthy and long-lasting with limited energy. Stealthy attackers transmit short jamming signals to become less detectable with less energy, and yet powerful enough to ruin the entire packet transmission procedures. For this study, we deal with three types of stealthy attacks: 'reactive jamming', 'jamming ACK', and 'fake ACK' attacks. These attacks are fatal to Low-power and Lossy wireless Network (LLN) applications because they not only interfere with communication, but also cause LLN devices to quickly drain their batteries. In this paper, we present Dodge-Jam, a light-weight antijamming technique suitable for LLN environments to address the stealthy jamming attacks with small overhead. It protects ACK exchange by switching the ACK channel calculated based on the content of a data packet. Moreover, by partitioning a packet into multiple small blocks and performing logical shifts of the blocks when retransmitting the packet, it helps the receiver recover the original packet from multiple erroneous packets. We implement Dodge-Jam on practical embedded devices, and evaluate its performance through experiments on a multihop LLN testbed. Our results show that Dodge-Jam successfully avoids many jamming attacks, recovers packets that have been jammed, and improves packet delivery performance of both singlehop and multihop networks significantly. © 2017 IEEE.