Aggressive Jamming Attack in IoT Networks

The emerging scope of the Internet-of-Things (IoT) has motivated both academia and industry to investigate the security aspect of this field. An IoT architecture is subject several potential cyber-attacks, one of which is Jamming attacks, where threats can affect performance and hence cause a critical problem for IoT devices. This paper presents several scenarios of a smart jamming attack (coalition attack) mechanism, where the attackers are originally legitimate nodes and form part of a network before they leave it and return as a compromised nodes. In order to intensify the attack, the compromised nodes re-group smartly, share the memorized network information, assign the role of a jammer for each node and subsequently achieve an aggregate jamming effect. Furthermore, the mechanism allows the compromised nodes to select the correct transmission rates for attacking according to an attacking-probability table which is kept updated during the coalition life cycle and contains the most probable link-transmission rate among the network nodes. Simulation results of the presented scenarios using NS3 show that attacks which rely on this mechanism can adversely affect the performance of the network.