Thwarting inside jamming attacks on wireless broadcast communications

Abstract

We address the problem of jamming-resistant broadcast communications under an internal threat model. We propose a time-delayed broadcast scheme (TDBS), which implements the broadcast operation as a series of unicast transmissions, distributed in frequency and time. TDBS does not rely on commonly shared secrets, or the existence of jamming immune control channels for coordinating broadcasts. Instead, each node follows a unique pseudo-noise (PN) frequency hopping sequence. Contrary to conventional PN sequences designed for multi-access systems, our sequences exhibit high correlation to enable broadcast. Moreover, their design limits the information leakage due to the exposure of a subset of sequences by compromised nodes. We map the problem of constructing such PN sequences to the 1-factorization problem for complete graphs. Our evaluation results show that TDBS can maintain broadcast communications in the presence of inside jammers.