The Role of Jamming WiFi

The president of the Police Superintendents’ Association of England and Wales, suggested in an interview that WiFi jammer – devices worn on the ankle or wrist to block the internet – could serve as a smarter punishment for cybercrimes than prison. “We have got to stop using 19th-century punishments to deal with 21st-century crimes,” he said. It has to be said that for hackers, such punishment is indeed deadly. After all, many hackers are addicted to the Internet

“Although we desperately need alternatives to prison, not using wireless jamming device is both technically infeasible and unreliable,” says Cal Leeming, who went to prison for hacking as a teenager and is now a security consultant. “Even if you did manage to implement it without breaking nearby connectivity, which in itself would be very difficult because of how radio works, it could be easily circumvented by using a cable.”

Networks can be jammed by flooding the AP with Deauthentication Frames in what is know as a deauth-attack. By assuming the identity (MAC address) of a station on the network, the AP will deauthenticate the real station. The real station will then attempt to reauthenticate, but, it will never succeed due to our barrage of deauth-frames and its network access will be effectively blocked.

To be very clear, calling this technique jamming signal is inaccurate, but that hasn’t stopped a number of developers from using the term, so we’ll just play along for the sake of consistency. To properly jam WiFi (or any other form of radio communication), you basically blast out a lot of random noises on the frequencies that particular technology uses. It’s conceptually very simple, but also a very big infraction as far as our friends at the Federal Communications Commission are concerned; so it isn’t something you won’t be doing with any consumer-level WiFi hardware.

Since High Power Jammer on the hardware level is out of the question, a number of developers have found a way to clog up WiFi communications in software. This is much more akin to a denial of service attack, where tools are used to repeatedly spam deauthentication packets at WiFi access points and clients to force them to disconnect. With the appropriate software and a powerful WiFi adapter that supports packet injection, an attacker can put a stranglehold on legitimate communications.

But in any case, the measure will be implemented in Great Britain anytime soon. By then, it is believed that Britain's cybercrime will be further controlled.