Krish Eswaran sent me a story about how a group at Virgina Tech described how LTE networks are susceptible to a certain kind of jamming strategy:

“An example strategy would be to target specific control or synchronization signals, in order to increase the geographic range of the jammer and better avoid detection,” the Wireless @ Virginia Tech research group said in a filing (PDF) submitted to the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. “The availability of low-cost and easy to use software-defined radios makes this threat even more realistic.”

Color me unsurprised! For my PhD, I studied arbitrarily varying channels (AVCs), which are information-theoretic models for communication against adversarial interference. There are a couple of design insights one can distill from considering the AVC model:

• Separating protocol and payload makes schemes susceptible to spoofing.
• Lack of synchronization/coordination between sender and receiver can be a real problem in adversarial settings.

Here we have a case where the protocol is easy to spoof/disrupt, essentially because the control information in unprotected.

This separation between control information and payload is often suboptimal in other senses. See, for example, Tchamkerten, Chandar and Wornell.