Jamming Beamforming: A New Attack Vector in Jamming IEEE 802.11ac Networks

Wireless LAN systems (WLAN) are intrinsically vulnerable to various jamming attacks. The recently released 802.11ac protocol standardizes beam forming which is susceptible to new types of jamming attacks. We summarize those attacks and provide a proof-of-concept based implementation for one very efficient such attack. As far as we know, there has not been any previous work done using the beam forming mechanism as a jamming attack vector. We have used a 802.11ac Access Point (AP) along with a commercially available 802.11ac Net gear (A6200) client, both capable of beam forming. For the jammer, we used a Universal Software Radio Peripheral (USRP2) Software Defined Radio (SDR). We show that jamming the beam forming mechanism is very effective in reducing the aggregate throughput of the targeted WLAN. Furthermore, we also show that the effects of jamming the beam forming mechanism in a Multi User Multiple Input Multiple Output (MU-MIMO) environment can bring the throughput down to a small fraction of its maximum potential.