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Compromise-resilient anti-jamming communication in wireless sensor networks

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Abstract

Jamming is a kind of Denial-of-Service attack in which an adversary purposefully emits radio frequency signals to corrupt the wireless transmissions among normal nodes. Although some research has been conducted on countering jamming attacks, few works consider jamming attacks launched by insiders, where 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 nodes. In this paper, we address the insider jamming problem in wireless sensor networks. In our proposed solutions, 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 the non-compromised nodes. After that, the insider jammers are revoked and will not be able to predict the future communication channels used by the non-compromised nodes. Specifically, we propose two compromise-resilient anti-jamming schemes: the split-pairing scheme which deals with a single insider jammer, and the key-tree-based scheme which copes with multiple colluding insider jammers. We implement and evaluate the proposed solutions using Mica2 Motes. Experimental results show that our solutions have low recovery latency and low communication overhead, and hence they are suitable for resource constrained sensor networks.

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions. This work was supported in part by Army Research Office under MURI grant W911NF-07-1-0318 and NSF CAREER 0643906.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, 16802, USA

    Xuan Jiang, Wenhui Hu, Sencun Zhu & Guohong Cao

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  1. Xuan Jiang
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  2. Wenhui Hu
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  3. Sencun Zhu
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  4. Guohong Cao
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Correspondence to Xuan Jiang.

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Jiang, X., Hu, W., Zhu, S. et al. Compromise-resilient anti-jamming communication in wireless sensor networks. Wireless Netw 17, 1513–1527 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-011-0361-8

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11276-011-0361-8

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