Security Vulnerabilities in Hybrid Flow-Specific Traffic-Adaptive Medium Access Control

Wireless network security is a daunting challenge as researchers analyze the vulnerabilities of wireless medium access control schemes such as IEEE 802.11, Bluetooth, and IEEE 802.16. While these wireless protocols employ traditional contention and non-contention approaches, recent work has identified the delay and throughput performance advantages of a flow-specific medium access hybrid solution for wireless networks such as the traffic-adaptive Cooperative Wireless Sensor Medium Access Control (CWS-MAC) protocol. Accordingly, this paper addresses the security of wireless networks employing these hybrid, flow-specific schemes by analyzing the vulnerabilities in traffic-adaptive CWS-MAC, many of which are applicable to hybrid medium access schemes in general. Critical vulnerabilities are identified that expose the protocol to denial of service, energy exhaustion and "greedy" attacks. The effect of attacks exploiting these vulnerabilities are shown to include decreased throughput and increased delay in both the contention and non-contention modes as well as increased per node energy consumption.