Network-Centric Countermeasures Against Integrated Sensing Enabled Jamming Adversaries

Abstract

Recent developments in Integrated Sensing and Communication have led to new adversarial models in wireless security through Integrated Sensing and Jamming (ISAJ) adversaries. ISAJ adversaries, owing to their sensing capabilities, are known to inject jamming energy over the victim's frequency band, and also use generalized energy measurements on various network frequencies to detect the presence of countermeasures. Existing countermeasures against such ISAJ adversaries are laid under the assumption that the adversary does not have the knowledge of the countermeasure. However, according to Kerchoffs' principle in cryptography, security of a countermeasure should only rely on the secret-keys, not on the obfuscation of the countermeasure. On testing the security of existing countermeasures, we observe that they violate Kerchoffs' principle, thus motivating the need for new countermeasures. In this regard, we propose a novel network-centric countermeasure against ISAJ adversaries, wherein a group of users in the network assist the victim to reliably communicate her messages in a covert manner. Firstly, we analyse the error performance of the proposed countermeasure, and study its behavior on the number of assisting users in the network. Subsequently, to validate its security against Kerchoffs' principle, we study the Shannon's entropy associated with the presence of the victim's messages in the network and analyse its behaviour as a function of the number of assisting users. Finally, to study the interplay between reliability and covertness, we pose interesting optimization problems and solve them to choose the underlying parameters of the countermeasure and the number of assisting users.