Practical Defenses Against Storage Jamming

Abstract : Storage jamming [15] is malicious but surreptitious modification of stored data, to reduce its quality. The person initiating the storage jamming does not receive any direct benefit. Instead, the goal is more indirect, such as deteriorating the position of a competitor. We assume that a Trojan horse does the storage jamming, since the Trojan horse may access data that the attacker cannot. Manual storage jamming is possible, but in general much less effective. We call values that should be stored authentic values. We call values stored by a jammer bogus values. A storage jamming attack diverges the state of the stored data from the authentic state. The attacker expects the bogus state will adversely affect the victim's performance of some real-world task. On the other hand, the attacker does not want the user to experience a catastrophic failure. The attacker expects that the victim will not detect the source of the problem but will continue to use the damaged data for a relatively long time. We make this more precise with the notion of lifetime. We define the lifetime of a storage jammer as the number of jams it can perform against a specific system before being discovered. The discovery does not necessarily have to be made on the system being jammed. The lifetime of a storage jammer is a function of the rate and extent of its jamming, the specific user population, and the seriousness of its impact on the real world.