Protecting Glossy-Based Wireless Networks from Packet Injection Attacks

Abstract

Glossy is a flooding-based communication primitive for low-power wireless networks that leverages constructive interference to achieve high reliability. The Low-power Wireless Bus (LWB) uses Glossy to abstract an entire wireless network into a shared bus like topology. As Glossy is not designed as a secure communication protocol, Glossy and hence LWB are vulnerable to unauthorised eavesdropping and packet injection attacks. In this paper, we propose several security mechanisms to protect Glossy and LWB communication and evaluate their effectiveness in real-world settings. The evaluation of the proposed security mechanisms shows that we can confine the effect of the packet injection attacks on Glossy networks into single hop nodes from the attacker.