Jamming-Resistant Communication: Channel Surfing without Negotiation

Channel surfing is an effective method to prevent jamming attacks in wireless communications. In traditional channel surfing schemes, two parties have to negotiate beforehand, in order to agree on the channel switching sequence. However, the negotiation process itself is vulnerable to jamming attacks. In this paper, we propose a novel channel surfing method without relying on such negotiation. Taking advantage of the reciprocity of the wireless fading channel, our method switches channels according to the random channel states observed by the two parties during their communication. Therefore, it does not introduce any extra communication overhead and can achieve strong security. To evaluate our method, we carry out extensive experiments using off-the-shelf 802.11 devices in a real indoor environment. Experimental results validate the efficiency and security of our method.