Developing a Systematic Process for Mobile Surveying and Analysis of WLAN security

Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN), familiarly known as Wi-Fi, is one of the most used wireless networking technologies. WLANs have rapidly grown in popularity since the release of the original IEEE 802.11 WLAN standard in 1997. We are using our beloved wireless internet connection for everything and are connecting more and more devices into our wireless networks in every form imaginable. As the number of wireless network devices keeps increasing, so does the importance of wireless network security. During its now over twenty-year life cycle, a multitude of various security measures and protocols have been introduced into WLAN connections to keep our wireless communication secure. The most notable security measures presented in the 802.11 standard have been the encryption protocols Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). Both encryption protocols have had their share of flaws and vulnerabilities, some of them so severe that the use of WEP and the first generation of the WPA protocol have been deemed irredeemably broken and unfit to be used for WLAN encryption. Even though the aforementioned encryption protocols have been long since deemed fatally broken and insecure, research shows that both can still be found in use today. The purpose of this Master’s Thesis is to develop a process for surveying wireless local area networks and to survey the current state of WLAN security in Finland. The goal has been to develop a WLAN surveying process that would at the same time be efficient, scalable, and easily replicable. The purpose of the survey is to determine to what extent are the deprecated encryption protocols used in Finland. Furthermore, we want to find out in what state is WLAN security currently in Finland by observing the use of other WLAN security practices. The survey process presented in this work is based on a WLAN scanning method called Wardriving. Despite its intimidating name, wardriving is simply a form of passive wireless network scanning. Passive wireless network scanning is used for collecting information about the surrounding wireless networks by listening to the messages broadcasted by wireless network devices. To collect our research data, we conducted wardriving surveys on three separate occasions between the spring of 2019 and early spring of 2020, in a typical medium-sized Finnish city. Our survey results show that 2.2% out of the located networks used insecure encryption protocols and 9.2% of the located networks did not use any encryption protocol. While the percentage of insecure networks is moderately low, we observed during our study that private consumers are reluctant to change the factory-set default settings of their wireless network devices, possibly exposing them to other security threats

ABAKA : a novel attribute-based k-anonymous collaborative solution for LBSs

The increasing use of mobile devices, along with advances in telecommunication systems, increased the popularity of Location-Based Services (LBSs). In LBSs, users share their exact location with a potentially untrusted Location-Based Service Provider (LBSP). In such a scenario, user privacy becomes a major con- cern: the knowledge about user location may lead to her identification as well as a continuous tracing of her position. Researchers proposed several approaches to preserve users’ location privacy. They also showed that hiding the location of an LBS user is not enough to guarantee her privacy, i.e., user’s pro- file attributes or background knowledge of an attacker may reveal the user’s identity. In this paper we propose ABAKA, a novel collaborative approach that provides identity privacy for LBS users considering users’ profile attributes. In particular, our solution guarantees p -sensitive k -anonymity for the user that sends an LBS request to the LBSP. ABAKA computes a cloaked area by collaborative multi-hop forwarding of the LBS query, and using Ciphertext-Policy Attribute-Based Encryption (CP-ABE). We ran a thorough set of experiments to evaluate our solution: the results confirm the feasibility and efficiency of our proposal