Channel surfing and spatial retreats: defenses against wireless denial of service

ABSTRACT

Wireless networks are built upon a shared medium that makes it easy for adversaries to launch denial of service (DoS) attacks. One form of denial of service is targeted at preventing sources from communicating. These attacks can be easily accomplished by an adversary by either bypassing MAC-layer protocols, or emitting a radio signal targeted at jamming a particular channel. In this paper we present two strategies that may be employed by wireless devices to evade a MAC/PHY-layer jamming-style wireless denial of service attack. The first strategy, channel surfing, is a form of spectral evasion that involves legitimate wireless devices changing the channel that they are operating on. The second strategy, spatial retreats, is a form of spatial evasion whereby legitimate mobile devices move away from the locality of the DoS emitter. We study both of these strategies for three broad wireless communication scenarios: two-party radio communication, an infrastructured wireless network, and an ad hoc wireless network. We evaluate several of our proposed strategies and protocols through ns-2 simulations and experiments on the Berkeley mote platform.

REFERENCES

• 1: Bruce Potter, Wireless Security's Future, IEEE Security and Privacy, v.1 n.4, p.68-72, July 2003 [doi>10.1109/MSECP.2003.1219074]
• 2: L. Zhou and Z. Haas, "Securing ad hoc networks," IEEE Network, vol. 13, no. 6, pp. 24--30, 1999.
• 3: Yih-Chun Hu , Adrian Perrig , David B. Johnson, Ariadne:: a secure on-demand routing protocol for ad hoc networks, Proceedings of the 8th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, September 23-28, 2002, Atlanta, Georgia, USA [doi>10.1145/570645.570648]
• 4: P. Papadimittratos and Z. Haas, "Secure routing for mobile ad hoc networks," in SCS Communication Networks and Distributed Systems Modeling and Simulations Conference (CNDS 2002), San Antonio, 2002.
• 5: J. Kong, H. Luo, K. Xu, D. Gu, M. Gerla, and S. Lu, "Adaptive security for multi-layer ad-hoc networks," Special Issue of Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, 2002.
• 6: Y.C. Hu, A. Perrig, and D. Johnson, "Packet leashes: a defense against wormhole attacks in wireless networks," in Proceedings of IEEE Infocom 2003, 2003, pp. 1976--1986.
• 7: Q. Huang, H. Kobayashi, and B. Liu, "Modeling of distributed denial of service attacks in wireless networks," 2003, vol. 1, pp. 41--44.
• 8: AusCERT, "Aa-2004.02 - denial of service vulnerability in ieee 802.11 wireless devices," http://www.auscert.org.
• 9: L. Kleinrock and F. Tobagi, "Packet switching in radio channels: Part i--carrier sense multiple-access modes and their throughput-delay characteristics," IEEE Trans. on Communications, vol. 23, no. 12, pp. 1400--1416, 1975.
• 10: L. Kleinrock, Queueing Systems, Volume 2: Computer Applications, John Wiley & Sons, 1976.
• 11: H. Vincent Poor, An introduction to signal detection and estimation (2nd ed.), Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., New York, NY, 1994
• 12: F.H.P. Fitzek and M. Reisslein, "MPEG-4 and H.263 video traces for network performance evaluation," IEEE Network, vol. 15, no. 6, pp. 40--54, November/December 2002.
• 13: B. Kedem, Time Series Analysis by Higher Order Crossings, IEEE Press, 1994.
• 14: Chipcon, "Chipcon cc1000 radio's datasheet," http://www.chipcon.com/files/CC1000_Data_Sheet_2_1.pdf.
• 15: Brad Karp , H. T. Kung, GPSR: greedy perimeter stateless routing for wireless networks, Proceedings of the 6th annual international conference on Mobile computing and networking, p.243-254, August 06-11, 2000, Boston, Massachusetts, United States [doi>10.1145/345910.345953]
• 16: Andrea Goldsmith, "Stanford University EE 359 Wireless Communications Course Notes," http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee359/.
• 17: Sangheon Pack , Yanghee Choi, Pre-Authenticated Fast Handoff in a Public Wireless LAN Based on IEEE 802.1x Model, Proceedings of the IFIP TC6/WG6.8 Working Conference on Personal Wireless Communications, p.175-182, October 23-25, 2002
• 18: X. Fu, T. Chen, A. Festag, H. Karl, G. Schäfer, and C. Fan, "Secure, QoS-enabled mobility support for IP-based networks," in Proc. IP Based Cellular Network Conference (IPCN), Paris, France, 2003.
• 19: Anthony D. Wood , John A. Stankovic , Sang H. Son, JAM: A Jammed-Area Mapping Service for Sensor Networks, Proceedings of the 24th IEEE International Real-Time Systems Symposium, p.286, December 03-05, 2003

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Distributed networks

Additional Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.2 COMPUTER-COMMUNICATION NETWORKS
      C.2.1 Network Architecture and Design
          Subjects: Network communications

General Terms:
Security

Keywords:
CSMA, Jamming, denial of service