An Experimental Study of Attacks on the Availability of Glossy

• Glossy is a reliable and low latency flooding mechanism designed primarily for distributed communication in wireless sensor networks (WSN). Glossy achieves its superior performance over tree-based wireless sensor networks by exploiting identical concurrent transmissions. WSNs are subject to wireless attacks aimed to disrupt the legitimate network operations. Real-world deployments require security and the current Glossy implementation has no built-in security mechanisms. In this paper, we explore the effectiveness of several attacks that attempt to break constructive interference in Glossy. Our results show that Glossy is quite robust to approaches where attackers do not respect the timing constraints necessary to create constructive interference. Changing the packet content, however, has a severe effect on the packet reception rate that is even more detrimental than other physical layer denial-of-service attacks such as jamming. We also discuss potential countermeasures to address these security threats and vulnerabilities.

Subject headings

NATURVETENSKAP  -- Data- och informationsvetenskap (hsv//swe)

NATURAL SCIENCES  -- Computer and Information Sciences (hsv//eng)

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Kommunikationssystem (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Communication Systems (hsv//eng)

Keyword

Glossy

Security Attacks

Sensor Networks

Network Security

Distributed Communication

Computer Science with specialization in Computer Communication

Publication and Content Type

ref (subject category)

art (subject category)