Efficient jamming attacks in Wi-Fi networks based on legacy short training field

Abstract

In some specific confidential occasions where Wi-Fi communication needs to be completely disabled, the interference device needs to meet the requirements of energy saving, portability, and long-distance interference. Motivated by this issue, we present and evaluate Legacy Short Training Field (L-STF) jamming attack, whereby a sender device determines the channel busy despite good channel conditions. In an L-STF attack, the attacker can generate L-STF signals and send signals continuously on the target channel. We implement the L-STF jamming attack on an SDR platform and evaluate the effectiveness through PSR metrics, we also test the energy efficiency on six Wi-Fi devices from different manufacturers. The result shows that sending L-STF signals within a fixed time interval under appropriate transmit power can disable Wi-Fi communication between devices. For all tested Wi-Fi devices, the attacker can disturb communication when jammer signals are about 40 times weaker than the legitimate signals. Together, L-STF jamming can block Wi-Fi communication effectively and energy-efficiently with simple software and hardware requirements.