Reactive Jamming and Attack Mitigation over Cross-Technology Communication Links

Abstract

Recently, Cross-Technology Communication (CTC), allowing the direct communication among heterogeneous devices with incompatible physical layers, has attracted much research attention. Many efficient CTC protocols have been proposed to demonstrate its promise in IoT applications. However, the applications built upon CTC will be significantly impaired when CTC suffers from malicious attacks such as jamming or sniffing. In this article, we implement a reactive jamming system, JamCloak, that can attack most existing CTC protocols. To this end, we first propose a taxonomy of the existing CTC protocols. Then based on the taxonomy, we extract essential features to train a CTC detection model, and estimate the parameters that can efficiently jam CTC links. Experimental results show that JamCloak consistently achieves 94.7% of classification accuracy on average in both Line-of-Sight and Non-Line-of-Sight scenarios. We also apply JamCloak to attack three existing CTC protocols: WiZig, Esense and EMF. Results show that JamCloak can significantly reduce PDR (packet delivery ratio) by 80.8% on average in practical environments. In the meantime, JamCloak’s jamming gain is more than 1.78× higher than the existing reactive jammer. In addition, we propose a practical countermeasure against reactive jamming attacks over CTC links like JamCloak. Results show that our approach significantly improves the jamming detection accuracy by 91.2% on average than the existing approach, and effectively decreases the reduction in packet delivery ratio to 1.7%.