Thwarting inside jamming attacks on wireless broadcast communications

We address the problem of jamming-resistant broadcast communications under an internal threat model. We propose a time-delayed broadcast scheme (TDBS), which implements the broadcast operation as a series of unicast transmissions, distributed in frequency and time. TDBS does not rely on commonly shared secrets, or the existence of jamming-immune control channels for coordinating broadcasts. Instead, each node follows a unique pseudo-noise (PN) frequency hopping sequence. Contrary to conventional PN sequences designed for multi-access systems, our sequences exhibit high correlation to enable broadcast. Moreover, their design limits the information leakage due to the exposure of a subset of sequences by compromised nodes. We map the problem of constructing such PN sequences to the 1-factorization problem for complete graphs. Our evaluation results show that TDBS can maintain broadcast communications in the presence of inside jammers.