A Study on False Channel Condition Reporting Attacks in Wireless Networks

Wireless networking protocols are increasingly being designed to exploit a user’s measured channel condition; we call such protocols channel-aware. Each user reports its measured channel condition to a manager of wireless resources and a channel-aware protocol uses these reports to determine how resources are allocated to users. In a channel-aware protocol, each user’s reported channel condition affects the performance of every other user. A possible attack against channel-aware protocols is false feedback of channel condition. The deployment of channel-aware protocols increases the risks posed by false feedback. In this paper, we study the potential impact of an attacker that falsely reports its channel condition and propose a defense mechanism to securely estimate channel condition. We analyze our mechanism and evaluate the system performance deploying our mechanism through simulation. Our evaluation shows that our mechanism effectively thwarts channel condition misreporting attack.