Detection of Rogue Access Point in WLAN using Hopfield Neural Network

The serious issue in the field of wireless communication is the security and how an organization implements the steps against security breach. The major attack on any organization is Man in the Middle attack which is difficult to manage. This attack leads to number of unauthorized access points, called rogue access points which are not detected easily. In this paper, we proposed a Hopfield Neural Network approach for an automatic detection of these rogue access points in wireless networking. Here, we store the passwords of the authentic devices in the weight matrix format and match the patterns at the time of login. Simulation experiment shows that this method is more secure than the traditional one in WLAN

Rogue access point detection framework on a multivendor access point WLAN

Thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Information Technology (MSIT) at Strathmore UniversityWireless internet access has become common throughout the world. IEEE 802.11 Wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) is now a common internet access standard almost becoming a requirement in homes, offices, universities and public places due to developments in Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD), mobile telephony and telecommuting. With the proliferation of Wi-Fi comes a number of information security challenges that have to be addressed. One of the major security threats that comes with Wi-Fi is the presence of rogue access points (APs) on the network. Unsuspecting employees in a company or attackers can introduce rogue APs to a secure wired network. The problem is amplified if the wireless local area network (WLAN) consist of multivendor APs. Malicious people can leverage on rogue APs to perform passive or active attacks on a computer network. Therefore, there is need for network administrators to accurately, with less effort, detect and control presence of rogue APs on multivendor WLANs. In this thesis, a solution that can accurately support detection of rogues APs on a multi-vendor AP WLAN without extra hardware or modification of AP firmware is presented. In the solution, information from beacon frames is compared to a set of approved parameters. Intervention of a network administrator is included to prevent MAC address spoofing. A structured methodology was adopted in developing the model on a Windows operating system. Python programming language was used in coding the system with Scapy and Tkinter as the main modules. SQLite database was used to store required data. The system was tested on a setup WLAN that composed of three different access points in a University lab. It was able to capture beacon frames sent by the access points and extracted MAC address, SSID and capability information as the key parameters used in identifying and classifying the access points. The system uses the captured information to automatically compare it against an existing database of authorized parameters. It is then able to classify an access point as either rogue or authorized. The system issued alerts that described the detected APs to a network administrator. The rest of this document gives details of scholarly works that are pertinent to the study, the research methodology used, implementation and testing of the model followed by discussions of findings and the conclusions and recommendations made by the researcher

Lack of Awareness by End Users on Security Issues Affecting Mobile Banking: A Case Study of Kenyan Mobile Phone End Users

The use of mobile phones in African has seen a formidable growth. The use of mobile phones to perform business and financial transactions seems to be on the increase as well. The rise in use of mobile phones to perform financial transactions also increases the risks associated with such transactions and especially man in the middle attacks. These compounded with lack of awareness among users means that they (the users) are highly exposed to such attacks. Due to the popular use of mobile banking in Kenya and the third world in particular, securing communication between the mobile device and the back end server has become a fundamental issue. This is due to the fact that hackers have the ability to steal banking information using various techniques, particularly the duping of mobile phone users to believe that they are communicating with a genuine program from their bank while in reality a user is simple giving away sensitive information to the hacker. This paper aims to investigate the level of awareness among users of mobile banking transactions in regards to man in the middle attacks and whether the awareness or lack of it can increase or deter such attacks Key words: mobile phones, Mobile banking services, Security, man in the middle attack

Towards Secure, Power-Efficient and Location-Aware Mobile Computing

In the post-PC era, mobile devices will replace desktops and become the main personal computer for many people. People rely on mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets for everything in their daily lives. A common requirement for mobile computing is wireless communication. It allows mobile devices to fetch remote resources easily. Unfortunately, the increasing demand of the mobility brings many new wireless management challenges such as security, energy-saving and location-awareness. These challenges have already impeded the advancement of mobile systems. In this dissertation we attempt to discover the guidelines of how to mitigate these problems through three general communication patterns in 802.11 wireless networks. We propose a cross-section of a few interesting and important enhancements to manage wireless connectivity. These enhancements provide useful primitives for the design of next-generation mobile systems in the future.;Specifically, we improve the association mechanism for wireless clients to defend against rogue wireless Access Points (APs) in Wireless LANs (WLANs) and vehicular networks. Real-world prototype systems confirm that our scheme can achieve high accuracy to detect even sophisticated rogue APs under various network conditions. We also develop a power-efficient system to reduce the energy consumption for mobile devices working as software-defined APs. Experimental results show that our system allows the Wi-Fi interface to sleep for up to 88% of the total time in several different applications and reduce the system energy by up to 33%. We achieve this while retaining comparable user experiences. Finally, we design a fine-grained scalable group localization algorithm to enable location-aware wireless communication. Our prototype implemented on commercial smartphones proves that our algorithm can quickly locate a group of mobile devices with centimeter-level accuracy

Proposed Framework for Securing Mobile Banking Applications from Man in the Middle Attacks

Mobile phone banking and payments continues to not only be a popular way of transacting business but it also seems to evolve rapidly. Despite its popularity however there seem to be some very genuine concerns on the security issues revolving around it, particularly in regard to man in the middle attacks. This paper seeks to propose a secure framework for communication between a mobile device and the back end server for protecting mobile banking applications from man-in-the-middle attacks without introducing further threats to the communication channel. Keywords: Defense- in-depth, Security, man in the middle attack, secure framework, bank serve

Runtime Detection of a Bandwidth Denial Attack from a Rogue Network-on-Chip

Chips with high computational power are the crux of today’s pervasive complex digital systems. Microprocessor circuits are evolving towards many core designs with the integration of hundreds of processing cores, memory elements and other devices on a single chip to sustain high performance computing while maintaining low design costs. Two decisive paradigm shifts in the semiconductor industry have made this evolution possible: (a) architectural and (b) organizational. At the heart of the architectural innovation is a scalable high speed data communication structure, the network-on-chip (NoC). NoC is an interconnect network for the glueless integration of on-chip components in the modern complex communication centric designs. In the recent days, NoC has replaced the traditional bus based architecture owing to its structured and modular design, scalability and low design cost. The organizational revolution has resulted in a globalized and collaborative supply chain with pervasive use of third party intellectual properties to reduce the time-to-market and overall design costs. Despite the advantages of these paradigm shifts, modern system-on-chips pose a plethora of security vulnerabilities. This work explores a threat model arising from a malicious NoC IP embedded with a hardware trojan affecting the resource availability of on-chip components. A rigorous simulation infrastructure is established to evaluate the feasibility and potency of such an attack. Further, a non-invasive runtime monitoring technique is proposed and thoroughly investigated to ensure the trustworthiness of a third party NoC IP with low overheads

From Map to Dist: the Evolution of a Large-Scale Wlan Monitoring System

The edge of the Internet is increasingly becoming wireless. Therefore, monitoring the wireless edge is important to understanding the security and performance aspects of the Internet experience. We have designed and implemented a large-scale WLAN monitoring system, the Distributed Internet Security Testbed (DIST), at Dartmouth College. It is equipped with distributed arrays of “sniffers” that cover 210 diverse campus locations and more than 5,000 users. In this paper, we describe our approach, designs and solutions for addressing the technical challenges that have resulted from efficiency, scalability, security, and management perspectives. We also present extensive evaluation results on a production network, and summarize the lessons learned

802.11 Fingerprinting to Detect Wireless Stealth Attacks

We propose a simple, passive and deployable approach for fingerprinting traffic on the wired side as a solution for three critical stealth attacks in wireless networks. We focus on extracting traces of the 802.11 medium access control (MAC) protocol from the temporal arrival patterns of incoming traffic streams as seen on the wired side, to identify attacker behavior. Attacks addressed include unauthorized access points, selfish behavior at the MAC layer and MAC layer covert timing channels. We employ the Bayesian binning technique as a means of classifying between delay distributions. The scheme requires no change to the 802.11 nodes or protocol, exhibits minimal computational overhead and offers a single point of discovery. We evaluate our model using experiments and simulations

FAIR: Forwarding Accountability for Internet Reputability

This paper presents FAIR, a forwarding accountability mechanism that incentivizes ISPs to apply stricter security policies to their customers. The Autonomous System (AS) of the receiver specifies a traffic profile that the sender AS must adhere to. Transit ASes on the path mark packets. In case of traffic profile violations, the marked packets are used as a proof of misbehavior. FAIR introduces low bandwidth overhead and requires no per-packet and no per-flow state for forwarding. We describe integration with IP and demonstrate a software switch running on commodity hardware that can switch packets at a line rate of 120 Gbps, and can forward 140M minimum-sized packets per second, limited by the hardware I/O subsystem. Moreover, this paper proposes a "suspicious bit" for packet headers - an application that builds on top of FAIR's proofs of misbehavior and flags packets to warn other entities in the network.Comment: 16 pages, 12 figure