Surveillance and Intervention of Infrastructure-Free Mobile Communications: A New Wireless Security Paradigm

Conventional wireless security assumes wireless communications are legitimate, and aims to protect them against malicious eavesdropping and jamming attacks. However, emerging infrastructure- free mobile communication networks can be illegally used (e.g., by criminals or terrorists) but are difficult to monitor, thus imposing new challenges in public security. To tackle this issue, this article presents a paradigm shift of wireless security to the surveillance and intervention of infrastructure-free suspicious and malicious wireless communications, by exploiting legitimate eavesdropping and jamming jointly. In particular, proactive eavesdropping (via jamming) is proposed to intercept and decode information from suspicious communication links for the purpose of inferring their intentions and deciding further measures against them. Cognitive jamming (via eavesdropping) is also proposed to disrupt, disable, and even spoof the targeted malicious wireless communications to achieve various intervention tasks.