You Can Jam But You Cannot Hide: Defending Against Jamming Attacks for Geo-Location Database Driven Spectrum Sharing

Abstract

The emerging paradigm for dynamic spectrum sharing is based on allowing secondary users (SUs) to exploit white space frequency that is not occupied by primary users. White space database provides an opportunity for SUs to obtain spectrum availability information by submitting a location-based query. However, this new paradigm can also be exploited by the attackers to significantly enhance their jamming capability due to the available channel information from spectrum queries, which is expected to increasingly block SUs. The challenge is that the unique characteristics (e.g., lack of the wide range frequencies or continuous broadband) make existing anti-jamming techniques (e.g., direct-sequence spread spectrum and frequency hopping spread spectrum) difficult to be applied. In this paper, we present a novel Jammer Inference-based Jamming Defense (jDefender) framework. The main idea of jDefender is inferring the likelihood of a user being a jammer based on the observed jamming events and then utilizing the inferred attack likelihood to enhance the effectiveness of a series of the proposed anti-jamming strategies. Specifically, we first propose the Channel Allocation-based Jammer Inference scheme to infer the likelihood of an SU being a jammer based on the channels occupied by SUs even under the collusion attack performed by multiple jammers. The strength of the anti-jamming strategies (e.g., puzzle difficulties, available spectrum resources) will be correlated with the possibility of an SU being a jammer to achieve the tradeoff between system performance and jamming tolerance. We then implement the proposed scheme on Universal Software Radio Peripheral and PC. Extensive evaluations are performed to validate the effectiveness of the attacks and countermeasures.