Safeguarding WiFi 7 and Beyond: Tackling Protocol-Aware Jamming in Multi-AP Coordination

Multi-access point (AP) coordination (MAP-Co) feature of WiFi 7 and beyond has recently gained significant attention due to its capability to facilitate concurrent transmissions of multiple APs by sharing radio resources among them. However, the security implications of MAP-Co are not studied yet. Existing research predominantly focuses on maximizing the number of APs involved in concurrent transmissions. This paper is the first to shed light on the vulnerabilities associated with MAP-Co control frames and demonstrate how a perpetrator can exploit these vulnerabilities to degrade MAP-Co performance and even completely jam the transmissions of a particular AP. We propose two novel intelligent jamming attacks, MTF Turmoil and Precision Jamming attacks, and necessary countermeasures to protect MAP-Co against these attacks. Furthermore, we propose analytical models to analyze the MAP-Co performance in scenarios with no attack, under attack, and under attack with countermeasures, and validate them against simulations. Mathematical analysis and extensive simulation results highlight the severity of our proposed attacks and demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed countermeasures.