Spoofing-jamming attack based on cross-technology communication for wireless networks

Abstract

Cross-Technology Communication(CTC) enables that WiFi devices can talk to ZigBee devices directly without any hardware changes or gateway equipment, and WiFi occupies a much wider bandwidth (20MHz) than ZigBee (2MHz), which sheds the light on spoofing-jamming attack based on CTC, where a WiFi device, as a sophisticated attacker spoofs or jams an area in which multiple-channels sensor network operating. In this work, we attempt to emulate two ZigBee frames under different frequencies within a single WiFi frame by controlling non-continuous bands of subcarriers. In other words, a WiFi device can independently communicate with the ZigBee devices operating in two channels. In a different perspective, the application based on CTC will be significantly impaired when CTC suffers from malicious attacks such as spoofing or jamming. In our work, we implement a parallel spoofing system, called SamBee, that can spoof the ZigBee devices operating in two different channels or jam the ZigBee devices operating in five distinct channels simultaneously only using a single WiFi frame, which causes maximum damage to the network in term of corrupted communication links with low cost. We implement our design based on a USRP-N210 and MICAz hybrid platform, the results show that parallel spoofing attacks and multiple-channels jamming attacks based on CTC is feasible, and our results also provide valuable insights about the associated defense mechanisms on achieving desirable performance.