JamRF: Performance Analysis, Evaluation, and Implementation of RF Jamming Over Wi-Fi

Abstract

Jamming attacks significantly degrade the performance of wireless communication systems and can lead to significant overhead in terms of re-transmissions and increased power consumption. Although different jamming techniques are discussed in the literature, numerous open-source implementations have used expensive equipment in the range of thousands of dollars, with the exception of a few. These implementations have also tended to be partial-band and do not cover the whole available bandwidth of the system under attack. In this work, we demonstrate that flexible, reliable, and low-priced software-defined radio (SDR) jamming is feasible by designing and implementing different types of jammers against IEEE 802.11n networks. First, to demonstrate the optimal jamming waveform, we present an analytical bit error rate expression of the system under attack by employing two common jamming waveforms: Gaussian noise and digitally modulated in an additive white Gaussian noise channel to obtain a lower bound performance. Then, we validated the finding obtained by the analysis via realistic end-to-end simulations using the MATLAB WLAN toolbox. Afterwards, we implement JamRF, a toolkit that employs a low-cost SDR to implement numerous types of jammers to further validate the analysis and simulation findings. The obtained results demonstrated that the Gaussian noise waveform outperformed the digitally modulated waveforms. Furthermore, in terms of jamming attack strategies, experimental results showed that to jam the whole 2.4GHz spectrum, a stateful-reactive jammer employing a random channel hopping jamming strategy achieves a packet loss ratio above 90%.

Keywords

• Bit error rate (BER)
• IEEE 802.11n
• jamming
• software defined radio (SDR)
• Wi-Fi