Compromise-resilient anti-jamming for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Jamming is a kind of Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack in which an adversary purposefully emits radio frequency signals to corrupt wireless transmissions. Thus, the communications among normal sensor nodes become difficult or even impossible. Although some research has been conducted on countering jamming attacks, few works considered jamming by insiders. Here, an attacker first compromises some legitimate sensor nodes to acquire the common cryptographic information of the sensor network and then jams the network through those compromised sensors. In this paper, as our initial effort, we propose a compromise-resilient anti-jamming scheme called split-pairing scheme to deal with single insider jamming problem in a one-hop network setting. In our solution, the physical communication channel of a sensor network is determined by the group key shared by all the sensor nodes. When insider jamming happens, the network will generate a new group key to be shared only by all non-compromised nodes. After that, the insider jammer is revoked and will be unable to predict the future communication channels used by non-compromised nodes. We implement and evaluate our solution using the Mica2 Mote platform and show it has low recovery latency and communication overhead, and it is a practical solution for resource constrained sensor networks under the single insider jamming attack. © 2010 Springer-Verlag.