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Silence is Golden: Exploiting Jamming and Radio Silence to Communicate

Published:09 March 2015Publication History
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Abstract

Jamming techniques require only moderate resources to be deployed, while their effectiveness in disrupting communications is unprecedented. In this article, we introduce several contributions to jamming mitigation. In particular, we introduce a novel adversary model that has both (unlimited) jamming reactive capabilities as well as powerful (but limited) proactive jamming capabilities. Under this adversary model, to the best of our knowledge more powerful than any other adversary model addressed in the literature, the communication bandwidth provided by current anti-jamming solutions drops to zero. We then present Silence is Golden (SiG): a novel anti-jamming protocol that, introducing a tunable, asymmetric communication channel, is able to mitigate the adversary capabilities, enabling the parties to communicate. For instance, with SiG it is possible to deliver a 128-bits-long message with a probability greater than 99% in 4096 time slots despite the presence of a jammer that jams all on-the-fly communications and 74% of the silent radio spectrum—while competing proposals simply fail. Moreover, when SiG is used in a scenario in which the adversary can jam only a subset of all the available frequencies, performance experiences a boost: a 128-bits-long message is delivered within just 17 time slots for an adversary able to jam 90% of the available frequencies. We present a thorough theoretical analysis for the solution, which is supported by extensive simulation results, showing the viability of our proposal.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Transactions on Information and System Security
      ACM Transactions on Information and System Security  Volume 17, Issue 3
      March 2015
      124 pages
      ISSN:1094-9224
      EISSN:1557-7406
      DOI:10.1145/2744298
      • Editor:
      • Gene Tsudik
      Issue’s Table of Contents

      Copyright © 2015 ACM

      Publisher

      Association for Computing Machinery

      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      • Published: 9 March 2015
      • Accepted: 1 September 2014
      • Revised: 1 July 2014
      • Received: 1 July 2013
      Published in tissec Volume 17, Issue 3

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