ESWORD: Implementation of Wireless Jamming Attacks in a Real-World Emulated Network

TL;DR

This paper introduces eSWORD, a large-scale emulation framework for wireless jamming attacks that accurately replicates real-world conditions, enabling safe, controlled, and scalable testing of electronic warfare strategies.

Contribution

eSWORD is the first framework to enable large-scale, real-time wireless jamming experiments with hardware-in-the-loop in an emulated environment, closely matching real-world results.

Findings

eSWORD accurately replicates real-world jamming effects in throughput and signal quality.

The framework supports large-scale experiments with up to 50 SDR nodes.

Experimental results show high fidelity between emulated and real-world jamming scenarios.

Abstract

Wireless jamming attacks have plagued wireless communication systems and will continue to do so going forward with technological advances. These attacks fall under the category of Electronic Warfare (EW), a continuously growing area in both attack and defense of the electromagnetic spectrum, with one subcategory being electronic attacks. Jamming attacks fall under this specific subcategory of EW as they comprise adversarial signals that attempt to disrupt, deny, degrade, destroy, or deceive legitimate signals in the electromagnetic spectrum. While jamming is not going away, recent research advances have started to get the upper hand against these attacks by leveraging new methods and techniques, such as machine learning. However, testing such jamming solutions on a wide and realistic scale is a daunting task due to strict regulations on spectrum emissions. In this paper, we introduce eSWORD, the first large-scale framework that allows users to safely conduct real-time and controlled jamming experiments with hardware-in-the-loop. This is done by integrating eSWORD into the Colosseum wireless network emulator that enables large-scale experiments with up to 50 software-defined radio nodes. We compare the performance of eSWORD with that of real-world jamming systems by using an over-the-air wireless testbed (ensuring safe measures were taken when conducting experiments). Our experimental results demonstrate that eSWORD follows similar patterns in throughput, signal-to-noise ratio, and link status to real-world jamming experiments, testifying to the high accuracy of the emulated eSWORD setup.