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Helper-Friendly Latency-Bounded Mitigation Strategies against Reactive Jamming Adversaries

Soumita Hazra, J. Harshan

TL;DR

This work addresses reactive jamming by adversaries that monitor energy statistics across bands and proposes two helper-friendly mitigations, DTRTF and LLCRTF, that enable reliable and covert communication without sacrificing helper-rate. Both schemes employ energy-sharing across two bands and optimize the energy-splitting factor $\alpha\in(0,1)$ to minimize the sum of the average decoding error $P_{Eavg}$ and the average detection probability $P_{Davg}$, with comprehensive error and covertness analyses. The authors derive upper bounds for error events in the DTRTF scheme, develop a sub-optimal decoding approach, and analyze covertness against instantaneous-energy and KLD detectors, showing favorable performance relative to baselines like RHS. The results indicate that the proposed strategies offer strong helper-friendliness, maintain victim reliability under latency constraints, and exhibit robust performance across admissible channel conditions, highlighting practical avenues for secure, energy-statistics-preserving cooperative mitigation against reactive jamming.

Abstract

Due to the recent developments in the field of full-duplex radios and cognitive radios, a new class of reactive jamming attacks has gained attention wherein an adversary transmits jamming energy over the victim's frequency band and also monitors various energy statistics in the network so as to detect countermeasures, thereby trapping the victim. Although cooperative mitigation strategies against such security threats exist, they are known to incur spectral-efficiency loss on the helper node, and are also not robust to variable latency-constraints on victim's messages. Identifying these research gaps in existing countermeasures against reactive jamming attacks, we propose a family of helper-friendly cooperative mitigation strategies that are applicable for a wide-range of latency-requirements on the victim's messages as well as practical radio hardware at the helper nodes. The proposed strategies are designed to facilitate reliable communication for the victim, without compromising the helper's spectral efficiency and also minimally disturbing the various energy statistics in the network. For theoretical guarantees on their efficacy, interesting optimization problems are formulated on the choice of the underlying parameters, followed by extensive mathematical analyses on their error-performance and covertness. Experimental results indicate that the proposed strategies should be preferred over the state-of-the-art methods when the helper node is unwilling to compromise on its error performance for assisting the victim.

Helper-Friendly Latency-Bounded Mitigation Strategies against Reactive Jamming Adversaries

TL;DR

This work addresses reactive jamming by adversaries that monitor energy statistics across bands and proposes two helper-friendly mitigations, DTRTF and LLCRTF, that enable reliable and covert communication without sacrificing helper-rate. Both schemes employ energy-sharing across two bands and optimize the energy-splitting factor to minimize the sum of the average decoding error and the average detection probability , with comprehensive error and covertness analyses. The authors derive upper bounds for error events in the DTRTF scheme, develop a sub-optimal decoding approach, and analyze covertness against instantaneous-energy and KLD detectors, showing favorable performance relative to baselines like RHS. The results indicate that the proposed strategies offer strong helper-friendliness, maintain victim reliability under latency constraints, and exhibit robust performance across admissible channel conditions, highlighting practical avenues for secure, energy-statistics-preserving cooperative mitigation against reactive jamming.

Abstract

Due to the recent developments in the field of full-duplex radios and cognitive radios, a new class of reactive jamming attacks has gained attention wherein an adversary transmits jamming energy over the victim's frequency band and also monitors various energy statistics in the network so as to detect countermeasures, thereby trapping the victim. Although cooperative mitigation strategies against such security threats exist, they are known to incur spectral-efficiency loss on the helper node, and are also not robust to variable latency-constraints on victim's messages. Identifying these research gaps in existing countermeasures against reactive jamming attacks, we propose a family of helper-friendly cooperative mitigation strategies that are applicable for a wide-range of latency-requirements on the victim's messages as well as practical radio hardware at the helper nodes. The proposed strategies are designed to facilitate reliable communication for the victim, without compromising the helper's spectral efficiency and also minimally disturbing the various energy statistics in the network. For theoretical guarantees on their efficacy, interesting optimization problems are formulated on the choice of the underlying parameters, followed by extensive mathematical analyses on their error-performance and covertness. Experimental results indicate that the proposed strategies should be preferred over the state-of-the-art methods when the helper node is unwilling to compromise on its error performance for assisting the victim.

Paper Structure

This paper contains 20 sections, 8 theorems, 31 equations, 15 figures, 2 tables.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction
  2. Motivation and Problem Statement
  3. Contributions
  4. Network Model
  5. Threat Model
  6. Overview of the Proposed Strategies
  7. DTRTF Mitigation Strategy
  8. Signalling over $f_{HB}$ Band
  9. Signalling over $f_{AB}$ Band
  10. Salient Features of the DTRTF Scheme
  11. Error Analysis of the DTRTF Scheme
  12. Upper Bound on $P_{E1}^{\Omega}$
  13. Upper Bound on $P_{E2}^{\Omega}$
  14. LLCRTF Mitigation Strategy
  15. Covertness Analysis at Dave
  16. ...and 5 more sections

Key Result

Proposition 1

For the DTRTF scheme, when $\partial = 0$,Robustness analyses on the reliability and covertness for $\partial \neq 0$ are discussed in the later sections.

Figures (15)

  • Figure 1: (a) Network model depicting uplink communication between the UEs and the base station. The reactive adversary, namely, Dave, is seen injecting jamming energy on the victim Alice, while monitoring all the network frequency bands. (b) Geometry capturing the relative positions of the UEs with respect to Bob, wherein, $\partial$ captures the variable for large-scale fading. All the channels experience multi-path fading due to mobility which is captured through small-scale fading.
  • Figure 2: Depiction of the frame structure and the corresponding energy levels over $f_{HB}$ in the DTRTF scheme. Only the data transmission phase is captured for exposition.
  • Figure 3: Representation of the transmission during the $k^{th}$ and $(n+k)^{th}$ time-slot over (a) $f_{HB}$ band, and (b) $f_{AB}$ band.
  • Figure 4: (a) Constellation diagram illustrating the symbols jointly communicated by Alice and Charlie during time-slot 1, presented in the form of $(x_1, y_1)$. (b) Constellation diagram illustrating the symbols communicated by Charlie during time-slot 2, presented in the form of $(\bar{x}_1, y_2)$.
  • Figure 5: Figure illustrating the error performance of the optimal decoder ($P_{Eavg}^{\Omega}$) and the SODTRTF decoder ($P_{E}^{\Omega sub}$), as a function of the energy-splitting factor $\alpha$. Additionally, we plot the derived upper bound on the average probability of decoding error ($P_{UEavg}^{\Omega sub}$) of the SODTRTF decoder.
  • ...and 10 more figures

Theorems & Definitions (10)

  • Proposition 1
  • proof
  • Theorem 1
  • Proposition 2
  • Theorem 2
  • Proposition 3
  • Theorem 3
  • Theorem 4
  • Proposition 4
  • proof