A Timing-Based Scheme for Rogue AP Detection

This paper considers a category of rogue access points (APs) that pretend to be legitimate APs to lure users to connect to them. We propose a practical timing-based technique that allows the user to avoid connecting to rogue APs. Our detection scheme is a client-centric approach that employs the rou...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on parallel and distributed systems 2011-11, Vol.22 (11), p.1912-1925
Main Authors: Hao Han, Bo Sheng, Tan, C. C., Qun Li, Sanglu Lu
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
Algorithms
Categories
IEEE 802.11
Internet
Joining
Monitoring
Probes
Protocols
Robustness
rogue access point
round trip time
Servers
Studies
Traffic
Traffic engineering
Traffic flow
Wireless communication
Wireless LAN
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Summary:This paper considers a category of rogue access points (APs) that pretend to be legitimate APs to lure users to connect to them. We propose a practical timing-based technique that allows the user to avoid connecting to rogue APs. Our detection scheme is a client-centric approach that employs the round trip time between the user and the DNS server to independently determine whether an AP is a rogue AP without assistance from the WLAN operator. We implemented our detection technique on commercially available wireless cards to evaluate their performance. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the accuracy, effectiveness, and robustness of our approach. The algorithm achieves close to 100 percent accuracy in distinguishing rogue APs from legitimate APs in lightly loaded traffic conditions, and larger than 60 percent accuracy in heavy traffic conditions. At the same time, the detection only requires less than 1 second for lightly-loaded traffic conditions and tens of seconds for heavy traffic conditions.
ISSN:1045-9219
1558-2183
DOI:10.1109/TPDS.2011.125