Wireless communication systems, such as wireless sensor networks and RFIDs, are increasingly adopted to transfer potential highly sensitive information. Since the wireless medium has a sharing nature, adversaries have a chance to eavesdrop confidential information from the communication systems. Adding artificial noises caused by friendly jammers emerges as a feasible defensive technique against adversaries. This paper studies the schedule strategies of friendly jammers, which are randomly and redundantly deployed in a circumscribed geographical area and can be unrechargeable or rechargeable, to maximize the lifetime of the jammer networks and prevent the cracking of jamming effect made by the eavesdroppers, under the constraints of geographical area, energy consumption, transmission power, and threshold level. An approximation algorithm as baseline is first proposed using the integer linear programming model. To further reduce the computational complexity, a heuristic algorithm based on the greedy strategy that less consumption leads to longer lifetime is also proposed. Finally, extensive simulation results show that the proposed algorithms are effective and efficient.
We consider a scenario where a sophisticated jammer jams an area in a single-channel wireless sensor network. The jammer controls the probability of jamming and transmission range to cause maximal damage to the network in terms of corrupted communication links. The jammer action ceases when it is detected by a monitoring node in the network, and a notification message is transferred out of the jamming region. The jammer is detected at a monitor node by employing an optimal detection test based on the percentage of incurred collisions. On the other hand, the network computes channel access probability in an effort to minimize the jamming detection plus notification time. In order for the jammer to optimize its benefit, it needs to know the network channel access probability and number of neighbors of the monitor node. Accordingly, the network needs to know the jamming probability of the jammer. We study the idealized case of perfect knowledge by both the jammer and the network about the strategy of one another, and the case where the jammer or the network lack this knowledge. The latter is captured by formulating and solving optimization problems, the solutions of which constitute best responses of the attacker or the network to the worst-case strategy of each other. We also take into account potential energy constraints of the jammer and the network. We extend the problem to the case of multiple observers and adaptable jamming transmission range and propose a intuitive heuristic jamming strategy for that case. Time-critical wireless applications in emerging network systems, such as e-healthcare and smart grids, have been drawing increasing attention in both industry and academia. The broadcast nature of wireless channels unavoidably exposes such applications to jamming attacks. However, existing methods to characterize and detect jamming attacks cannot be applied directly to time-critical networks, whose communication traffic model differs from conventional models. In this paper, we aim at modeling and detecting jamming attacks against time-critical traffic. We introduce a new metric, message invalidation ratio, to quantify the performance of time-critical applications. A key insight that leads to our modeling is that the behavior of a jammer who attempts to disrupt the delivery of a time-critical message can be exactly mapped to the behavior of a gambler who tends to win a gambling game. We show via the gambling-based modeling and real-time experiments that there in general exists a phase transition phenomenon for a time-critical application under jamming attacks: as the probability that a packet is jammed increases from 0 to 1, the message invalidation ratio first increases slightly (even negligibly), then increases dramatically to 1. Based on analytical and experimental results, we further design and implement the JADE (Jamming Attack Detection based on Estimation) system to achieve efficient and robust jamming detection for time-critical wireless networks. 802.11a, b, and g standards were designed for deployment in cooperative environments, and hence do not include mechanisms to protect from jamming attacks. In this paper, we explore how to protect 802.11 networks from jamming attacks by having the legitimate transmission hop among channels to hide the transmission from the jammer. Using a combination of mathematical analysis and prototype experimentation in an 802.11a environment, we explore how much throughput can be maintained in comparison to the maintainable throughput in a cooperative, jam-free environment. Our experimental and analytical results show that in today's conventional 802.11a networks, we can achieve up to 60 of the original throughput. Our mathematical analysis allows us to extrapolate the throughput that can be maintained when the constraint on the number of orthogonal channels used for both legitimate communication and for jamming is relaxed. 