Stealthy off-target couple control plane jamming

Date
2022-08-05
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Abstract

Multi- and single-user beamforming is a key feature for realizing a high data rate in next-generation Wi-Fi such as IEEE 802.11ax. In this paper, we study for the first time, a jammer that strategically attacks layer two (L2) control frames associated with beamforming to realize a denial-of-service (DoS) attack on transport (L4) and application layer (L7) control planes. By coupling the attack across control plane layers, the attacker targets throughput or availability DoS while also maintaining stealth via low airtime jamming and “off-target jamming” in which the targeted higher layer message is never directly jammed. With end-to-end application layer experiments, we show that such a jammer can reduce TCP throughput to 1% with less than 0.1% of jamming air-time. Moreover, the attack can yield seconds-to-minute scale outages by targeting the L4 or L7 setup messages while leaving a minimal footprint.

Description
Advisor
Degree
Master of Science
Type
Thesis
Keywords
coupled control plane mechanisms, control frame jamming, stealthy jamming
Citation

Gupta, Shreya. "Stealthy off-target couple control plane jamming." (2022) Master’s Thesis, Rice University. https://hdl.handle.net/1911/113271.

Has part(s)
Forms part of
Published Version
Rights
Copyright is held by the author, unless otherwise indicated. Permission to reuse, publish, or reproduce the work beyond the bounds of fair use or other exemptions to copyright law must be obtained from the copyright holder.
Link to license
Citable link to this page