Asymptotically Guaranteed Anti-Jamming Spread Spectrum Random Access Without Pre-Shared Secret

Abstract

Our main contribution is the design of a spread spectrum random access scheme without pre-shared secret with asymptotically guaranteed availability against electronic/cyber-based jamming attacks. In order to establish asymptotic anti-jamming guarantees, first we develop the system model and show that for reactive jamming (only limited by the laws of physical propagation), the required location for a successful attack can be controlled by design. Then, for non-reactive protocol-aware jamming, we map a random selection of (publicly known) spreading codes to the computational birthday problem. Differently to the related literature, we formulate the birthday problem using entropic measures (Rényi entropy), which allows to obtain the optimal spreading code set sizes that guarantee asymptotically zero collision probability. Accordingly, the birthday attack is the best strategy to optimize the (trial and error) blind acquisition at the legitimate detector. We obtain numerical results that illustrate how to use our entropic method as a system design degree of freedom to identify realistic spreading code set sizes. We also derive an upper bound of the detection latency. Finally, we show that the resulting anti-jamming throughput is higher than the throughput under conventional operation (i.e. without anti-jamming guarantees) due to the control of collision probability by-design.