JAMMING TECHNIQUES

BASICS OF JAMMING:
Jamming is used to compromise nodes in wireless environment. Its
working goes in fake way like jammer ensures authorized users as it
is also an authorized one 2.4GHz frequency can easily be jammed by
a good attacker. Signals are dropped by a good attacker to a level
where wireless network no longer works. Disrupting a cell phone is
the same as jamming any other type of radio communication. A cell
phone works by communicating with its service network through a
cell tower or base station. Cell towers divide a city into small areas, or
cells. As a cell-phone user drives down the street, the signal is handed
from tower to tower.
A jamming device transmits on the same radio frequencies as the cell
phone, disrupting the communication between the phone and the cell-
phone and cell phone base station in the tower.
It’s called a denial-of-service attack. The jammer denies service of the
radio spectrum to the cell-phone users within range of the jamming
device.
The rapid proliferation of cell phone sat the beginning of the 21 st
century eventually raised problems, such as their potential to invade
privacy or contribute to academic cheating. In addition, public
backlash was growing against the disruption cell phones introduced in
daily life. While older analog cell phones often suffered from poor
reception and could even be disconnected by simple interference such
as high frequency noise, now interestingly sophisticated digital
phones have led to more elaborate counters. Cell phone jamming
devices are an alternative to more expensive measures against cell
phones, such as Faraday cages, which are mostly suitable as built in
protection for structures. They were originally developed for law
enforcement and the military to interrupt communications by
criminals and terrorists. Some were also designed to foil the use
certain remotely denoted explosives. The civilian applications were
apparent, so over time many companies originally contracted to
design jammers for government use switched over to sell these
devices to private entities. Since then, there has been a slow but
steady increase in their purchase and use, especially in major
metropolitan areas.
To jam a cell phone, a device that broadcasts on the correct
frequencies is needed. Although different cellular systems process
signals differently, cell-phone networks use radio signals that can be
interrupted. GSM, used in digital cellular and PCS-based systems,
operates in the 900MHz and 1800MHz bands in Europe and Asia and
in the 1900MHz band in the United States. Jammers can broadcast on
my frequency and are effective against AMPS, CDMA, TDMA,
GSM, PCS, DCS, iDEN, and Nextel systems. Old-fashioned analog
cell phones and today’s digital devices are equally susceptible to
jamming.
The actual range of the jammer depends on its power and the local
environment, which may include hills or walls of a building that block
the jamming signal. Low-powered jammers block calls in a range of
about 30 feet (9m). Higher-powered units create a cell-free zone as
large as a football field. Units used by law enforcement can shut down
service up to 1 mile from the device.
JAMMING TYPES:
Jamming makes use of intentional radio interferences to harm
wireless communication by keeping communicating medium busy,
causing a transmitter to back-off whenever it senses busy wireless
medium, or corrupted signal received at receivers. Jamming mostly
targets attacks at the physical layer but sometimes cross-layer attacks
are possible too.
Jammer can be divided into following types:
1.Constant Jammer: It emits continuous, random bits without
following the Carrier Sense Multiple Access (CSMA) protocol.
According to the CSMA mechanism, a legitimate node has to sense
the status of the wireless medium before transmitting. If the medium
is continuously idle for DCF Interframe Space (DIFS) duration, only
then it is supposed to transmit a frame. If the channel is found busy
during the DIFS interval, the station should defer its transmission. A
constant jammer prevents legitimate nodes from communicating with
each other by causing the wireless media to be constantly busy. This
type of attack is energy inefficient and easy to detect but is very easy
to launch and can damage network communications to the point that
no one can communicate at any time.
2. Deceptive Jammer: it continuously transmits regular packets
instead of emitting random bits. It deceive other nodes to believe that
a legitimate transmission is taking place so that they remain in
receiving states until the jammer is turned off or dies. Compared to a
constant jammer, it is more difficult to detect a deceptive jammer
because it transmits legitimate packets instead of random bits. Similar
to the constant jammer, deceptive jammer is also energy inefficient
due to the continuous transmission but is very easily implemented.
3.Random Jammer: It intermittently transmits either random bits or
regular packets into networks. Contrary to the above two jammers, it
aims at saving energy. It continuously switches between two states:
sleep phase and jamming phase. It sleeps for a certain period of and
then becomes active for jamming before returning back to a sleep
state. The sleeping and jamming time periods are either fixed or
random. There is a tradeoff between jamming effectiveness and
energy saving because it cannot jam during its sleeping period. The
ratios between sleeping and jamming time can be manipulated to
adjust this tradeoff between efficiency and effectiveness.
4.Reactive Jammer: It jams the network by corrupting the
transmissions of data or acknowledgement (ACK) packets. It does not
react until a data transmission starts at the transmitter end. This type
of jammer can corrupt data packets, or it waits until the data packets
reach the receiver and then corrupts the ACK packets. The
corruptions of both data packets ACK messages will lead to re-
transmissions at the sender end. In the first case, because data packets
are not received correctly at the receiver, they have to re-transmitted.
In the second case, since the sender does not receive the ACKs, it
believes something is wrong at the receiver side, e.g. buffer overflow.
Therefore, it will retransmit the data packets.
5.Signal Jammer: Devices that prevent mobile computers from
communicating with radio stations’ mobile operator, not allowing
people to take calls or data transfer (SMS, Internet access, etc.). These
devices act by emitting a radio signal in different frequency bands
(e.g. 850MHz and 1900MHz) covering all mobile
telecommunications technologies (2G, 3G, 4G, Satellite, etc.) as well
as any other radio communication as example television.