Hamming distance as a metric for the detection of side channel in 802.11 wireless communications
Date
2015-04-01
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Abstract
A wireless network can be exploited in many ways. One way is through intentionally corrupting the Frame Check Sequence
(FCS) field by using a different Cyclic Redundancy Check (CRC) polynomial in order to create a side channel. Malicious nodes
exploit the fact that normal unsuspecting nodes will immediately drop erroneous frames. A metric called the Hamming
Distance (HD) was proposed for detection which distinguishes legitimate from illegitimate errors. The idea is to apply this HD
measure to compare CRC values that are generated by different CRC polynomials. The hypothesis is that the average HD
between two CRC values generated by two different CRC polynomial would be significantly far apart than those that are
generated by the same CRC polynomial. The results show that this HD metric is effective in detection of side channel frames.
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Keywords
Side channel, Covert communication, Anomaly detection, Wireless ad hoc network, Hamming distance