Mitigating Basestation Jamming in Sensor Networks

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Mitigating Base-station Jamming in Sensor
Networks

• Sherif Khattab, Daniel Mossé, Rami Melhem
• Department of Computer Science
• University of Pittsburgh
• WPDRTS
• April 25, 2006

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Example Application
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Wireless sensor network

• Base station sends query
• Sensors collect and send data back
• Attackers can cause
• denial of service by
• jamming the
• base station

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Replication

• Replicating base stations
• Effective?
• Attackers can jam all replicas
• Energy efficient?

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Evasion

• Single Mobile Base station
• Effective?
• Energy-efficient?

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Honeybees (1/2)

• Mobile base stations roam among collection points
  to collect data

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Honeybees (2/2)

• How many replicas?
• How much evasion?

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Attack Strategies

• Attack target
• Random vs. scheduled
• When to move
• Synchronized vs. unsynchronized

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Defense Strategies

• When to evade
• Proactive, reactive, and hybrid
• Where to evade
• Random vs. Scheduled (pseudo-random)
• Which Base station to move
• Random vs. Jammed

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Simulation Parameters

• Base stations and attackers are PackBot robots
  www.packbot.com
• 13 Km/h speed
• 60 W moving power
• Mobile base stations equipped with motes
• Communication power 60 mW
• 20 collection points
• Travel time between collection points 100 seconds
  ( 360 m distance)
• Simulation time 106 seconds

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Metrics

• Blocking Probability
• Percentage of time all base stations are blocked
• Relative Power Consumption
• (Attack power consumption) / (Defense power
  consumption)
• Jamming Defense Power Efficiency (JDPE)
• (1- Blocking Probability)
• (Attack-to-defense power ratio)

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Attack Strategy

• Periodically, a number of attackers move to
  unjammed collection points
• We determine the best (from attack perspective)
  attack moving period experimentally
• Against single mobile base station

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Attack Strategy
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Blocking Probability
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Relative Power Consumption
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JDPE
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Two-party wireless communication

• Attackers can jam a large number of radio
  frequencies

Frequencies
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Solution

• Data Replication with frequency hopping

Frequencies
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Summary

• Honeybees mitigates jamming attacks by combining
• Replication of base stations and collection
  points
• Evasion using pseudo-random hopping
• Future work
• Study interaction between other attack and
  replica strategies
• Develop models for attack and defense strategies
• Predict number of attackers and attack strategy
• Adapt defense strategy accordingly

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Questions?