Channel Detecting Jamming Attacks on Symmetric Blind Rendezvous Algorithms for Cognitive Radio Networks

Recently, blind rendezvous algorithms have been proposed for cognitive radio networks due to the limitations of centralized servers or common control channels. However, these algorithms are vulnerable to our Channel Detecting Jamming Attacks (CDJAs) where a jammer computes and jams their channel hopping sequences by utilizing the properties of each rendezvous scheme. We have demonstrated that CDJAs, with capabilities similar to normal users, can significantly reduce rendezvous success rates for the Modular Clock and Jump Stay symmetric blind rendezvous algorithms [11], [12]. Here, we extend our CDJAs to the Generated Orthogonal Sequence (GOS) [15] algorithms. Our CDJAs, with one/two listening channels, quickly determine the channel hopping sequence for the GOS algorithm. Corresponding simulation results show the rendezvous success rates of GOS and other efficient blind rendezvous algorithm dramatically decrease under CDJAs. We compare these results to the Random rendezvous algorithm and show Random vastly outperforms five efficient blind algorithms under CDJAs and in other measures as well. Our CDJA is a major security concern for the state-of-the-art symmetric blind rendezvous algorithms for cognitive radio networks.