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; the authors 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, they study the potential impact of an attacker that falsely reports its channel condition and propose a defense mechanism to securely estimate channel condition.