Pinball Attacks: Exploiting Channel Allocation In Wireless Networks

Abstract

As wireless networks continue to grow rapidly denser with the introduction of various wireless-enabled elements, signal interference coupled with limited radio spectrum availability emerges as a significant hindrance to network performance. In order to retain high network throughput, channels must be strategically assigned to nodes in a way that minimizes signal overlap between neighboring nodes. Current static channel assignment techniques are intolerant of network variations and growth, but flexible dynamic techniques are becoming more feasible with the introduction of software defined networks and network function virtualization. As network maintenance tasks are increasingly handled by software, however, network stability becomes susceptible to malicious behavior. In this paper, we adopt an attacker's prespective and expose stealthy attacks - which we coin pinball Attacks - that aim to trigger unnecessary channel switching behavior in a network and increase signal interference between neighboring nodes. We develop a Markov Decision Process (MDP) framework and investigate suboptimal attack policies applied to a number of real-world topologies. We derive attack policies as approximate MDP solutions due to the exponentially large state space. Our results show that pinball attack outperforms other attack policies such as Denial of Service, Random, and other heuristic policies.

Publication Date

7-12-2016

Publication Title

2016 IEEE International Conference on Communications, ICC 2016

Document Type

Article; Proceedings Paper

Personal Identifier

scopus

DOI Link

https://doi.org/10.1109/ICC.2016.7510986

Socpus ID

84981303278 (Scopus)

Source API URL

https://api.elsevier.com/content/abstract/scopus_id/84981303278

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