Learning Strategies for Resisting Power Attacks on Wi-Fi Direct Group Formation

Attacks — on the recent Wi-Fi Direct standard developed for IoT devices — that exploit the high power consumption required for the group owner function are addressed here by introducing intelligent decision making into the group owner negotiation process. The Wi-Fi Direct standard was introduced with the intention of simplifying peer-to-peer connections in home applications while helping devices to save power by centralizing effort into a single group owner device negotiated on start-up. Attacks on the group formation stage can be based on manipulating a victim device to frequently end up being assigned the group owner function, thereby depleting its batteries at faster rates than its peer devices. This manipulation is made easy by the group formation process adopted by the standard. We propose to enhance the group formation process with secure features ensuring fairness by relying on commitments and learning about the behavior observed for peer devices in the past. Simulations are used to quantify the resistance achieved against several attack strategies.