The Feasibility of Launching Reduction of Quality (RoQ) Attacks in 802.11 Wireless Networks

In this paper, we discuss wireless reduction of quality (RoQ) attacks against the transmission control protocol (TCP). RoQ attacks can dramatically degrade the TCP performance with a less number of wireless jamming attacking packets, which makes them rather difficult to detect. We propose a RoQ attack model which exposes the possibility to launch a RoQ attack and illustrates attack conditions. A CTS jamming method is proposed to make it possible to launch RoQ attacks in 802.11b/g wireless networks. The wireless RoQ attacks are evaluated in both NS2 simulation environment and practical wireless networks. Experimental results demonstrate that it is possible to degrade wireless TCP throughput through RoQ attacks with undetectable low-rate attacking traffic.