networks
Bend the beam like Beckham to defeat anti-jamming tech
It's hard to stop a signal jammer if you can't locate the source, say Rice University researchers
Wireless jamming attacks are on the rise. Rice University researchers have shown how self-curving radio beams can make a jammer appear to be somewhere it isn't, potentially undermining some anti-jamming defenses.Jamming relies on flooding a wireless receiver with noise that denies service. Some modern receivers identify and block jamming attempts using direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation technology that pinpoints the jammer's direction and directs an array null that blocks signals emanating in the jammer’s direction. Were a jammer to transmit a self-curving beam, however, it could fool DoA-based anti-jamming defenses by appearing to come from somewhere else entirely, and that's exactly what the Rice researchers demonstrated.Rice electrical and computer engineering professor Edward Knightly and doctoral student Caroline Spindel presented a paper [PDF] last month in which they demonstrated a curving-beam jamming attack that caused "catastrophic bit-error-rate degradation" while also "fool[ing] the receiver's DoA estimator," preventing conventional DoA-based defenses from stopping the interference.
