Jump and Wobble: A Defense Against Hidden Terminal Emulation Attack in Dense IoT Networks

Abstract

The unprecedented growth in Internet of Things (IoT) deployment is making it difficult to safeguard IoT infrastructures against novel security threats. Recently, a new attack, hidden terminal emulation (HTE), has shed light on a vulnerability in the co-located and dense IoT networks, where the attacker emulates a hidden node from an external co-located network. HTE attack exploits the heterogeneity among different IoT networks, the shared nature of spectrum access, and the proximity to the victim IoT device in a dense IoT scenario to interrupt the victim’s communication. Prior work on HTE attack, however, considers an omniscient attack model, which has strong assumptions. In contrast, we propose a constrained attack model, which considers the sensing constraints of an attacker. Afterward, we propose a novel safeguard approach based on the Markov decision process to counteract the proposed attack model, namely Jump and Wobble. This work is among the very few to highlight the lower-layer vulnerabilities of spectrum coexistence in dense co-located IoT networks and, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first to propose a defense mechanism against HTE attacks.