JamDetect: A system to detect RAA aware jamming attacks in IEEE802.11 networks

The popularity of wireless sensor and mobile computing networks has increased exponentially in recent years with applications ranging from environmental monitoring and emergency response to battlefield operations. However, recent work has brought to the forefront a new class of intelligent IEEE802.11 jammers that are rate adaptation algorithm (RAA) aware. These jammers selectively jam packets to force the RAA of the transmitter to decrease the transmission rate and prevent future rate increases. RAA aware jammers significantly degrade network performance while expending only minimal energy achieving up to 100x higher efficiency in contrast to traditional jammers. Due to the threat posed by this new class of jammers we propose JamDetect, a transmitter based active detection system for RAA aware jamming attacks. The detection is based on identifying the randomness of the packet loss sequence. We evaluate the performance of our system using a comprehensive set of scenarios that combine RAA aware jamming with natural wireless phenomena such as fading, hidden terminal interference, and nodal mobility. The results show that the detection rate of our system is more than 90% with a false positive rate of at less than 5% for the vast majority of cases.