USD-FH: Jamming-resistant wireless communication using Frequency Hopping with Uncoordinated Seed Disclosure

Spread spectrum techniques (e.g., Frequency Hopping (FH), Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS)) have been widely used for anti-jamming wireless communications. Such techniques require that communicating devices agree on a shared secret before communication. However, it is non-trivial for two devices that do not share any secret to establish one in presence of a jammer. Recently, several schemes relying on Uncoordinated Frequency Hopping (UFH) were proposed to allow two devices to establish a secret key using Diffie-Hellman (DH) key establishment protocol in presence of jammers. Unfortunately, all these schemes are limited in efficiency. In this paper, we propose a novel scheme named USD-FH, which uses Uncoordinated Seed Disclosure in Frequency Hopping to establish a shared secret in presence of jammers. The basic idea is to transmit each DH key establishment message using a one-time pseudo-random hopping pattern and disclose the corresponding seed in an uncoordinated manner before the actual message. Due to the large number of channels available for wireless communication, the jammers cannot control all channels at the same time. When the receiver and the sender use the same channel during seed disclosure, the receiver can get the seed. If the jammer does not listen on the same channel (and thus it does not know the hopping pattern), the receiver can receive the actual message without being jammed. We validate USD-FH through both theoretical analysis and simulation. Our results show that USD-FH is much more efficient and robust than previous solutions.