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

TLDR: This paper presents two strategies that may be employed by wireless devices to evade a MAC/PHY-layer jamming-style wireless denial of service attack, and studies both of these strategies for three broad wireless communication scenarios: two-party radio communication, an infrastructured wireless network, and an ad hoc wireless network.

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.