Mitigating stealthy jamming attacks in low-power and lossy wireless networks

Jamming in wireless networks has advanced 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 entire packet transmission procedures. In this article, 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. To counter these attacks, we present Dodge-Jam, a lightweight anti-jamming technique suitable for LLN environments to address the stealthy jamming attacks. It protects ACK packet by switching the ACK exchange channel to a channel calculated based on the content of a data packet. Moreover, by partitioning a packet into multiple blocks and performing logical shifts of the blocks when retransmitting the packet, it helps the receiver recover the original packet from received multiple erroneous packets. We implement Dodge-Jam on practical embedded devices, and evaluate its performance through mathematical analysis and experiments on a multi-hop LLN testbed. Our results show that Dodge-Jam successfully avoids many stealthy jamming attacks, recovers jammed packets, and significantly improves packet delivery performance of single-hop and multi-hop networks with small overhead.1