Silence is Golden: exploiting jamming and radio silence to communicate
This addresses secure communication in adversarial environments like military or critical infrastructure, offering a novel solution to a known bottleneck.
The paper tackles the problem of communication under a powerful jamming adversary that can disrupt both active transmissions and silent radio spectrum, and presents the Silence is Golden (SiG) protocol, which enables reliable message delivery with over 99% probability in 4096 time slots even when 74% of the spectrum is jammed.
Jamming techniques require just moderate resources to be deployed, while their effectiveness in disrupting communications is unprecedented. In this paper we introduce several contributions to jamming mitigation. In particular, we introduce a novel adversary model that has both (unlimited) jamming reactive capabilities as well as powerful (but limited) proactive jamming capabilities. Under this powerful but yet realistic adversary model, the communication bandwidth provided by current anti-jamming solutions drops to zero. We then present Silence is Golden (SiG): a novel anti jamming protocol that, introducing a tunable, asymmetric communication channel, is able to mitigate the adversary capabilities, enabling the parties to communicate. For instance, with SiG it is possible to deliver a 128 bits long message with a probability greater than 99% in 4096 time slots in the presence of a jammer that jams all the on-the-fly communications and the 74% of the silent radio spectrum---while competing proposals simply fail. The provided solution enjoys a thorough theoretical analysis and is supported by extensive experimental results, showing the viability of our proposal.