Mitigating Interleaving Jamming of IEEE 802.11

Recent jamming attacks against IEEE 802.11 (WiFi) have targeted the interleaving mechanism to greatly improve power efficiency, getting as good as 95% packet loss using 0.1% transmitter power. In this paper, we propose a novel method of modifying the interleaver to prevent this attack vector through using a shared secret to deterministically interleave the data in such a way that is not susceptible to targeted subcarrier jamming. We implement and test this approach using software defined radio. We show it entirely negates the impact of interleaving targeted jamming, without making the signal more susceptible to more traditional jamming methods or additive Gaussian white noise. We show that our modified interleaver makes these attacks less effective than whole-channel jamming by as much as 15% lower packet loss.