A Survey on Wireless Security: Technical Challenges, Recent Advances and Future Trends

This paper examines the security vulnerabilities and threats imposed by the inherent open nature of wireless communications and to devise efficient defense mechanisms for improving the wireless network security. We first summarize the security requirements of wireless networks, including their authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability issues. Next, a comprehensive overview of security attacks encountered in wireless networks is presented in view of the network protocol architecture, where the potential security threats are discussed at each protocol layer. We also provide a survey of the existing security protocols and algorithms that are adopted in the existing wireless network standards, such as the Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, WiMAX, and the long-term evolution (LTE) systems. Then, we discuss the state-of-the-art in physical-layer security, which is an emerging technique of securing the open communications environment against eavesdropping attacks at the physical layer. We also introduce the family of various jamming attacks and their counter-measures, including the constant jammer, intermittent jammer, reactive jammer, adaptive jammer and intelligent jammer. Additionally, we discuss the integration of physical-layer security into existing authentication and cryptography mechanisms for further securing wireless networks. Finally, some technical challenges which remain unresolved at the time of writing are summarized and the future trends in wireless security are discussed.Comment: 36 pages. Accepted to Appear in Proceedings of the IEEE, 201

Cloned Access Point Detection and Point Detection and Prevention Mechanism in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Mesh Networks

IEEE 802.11 Wireless Mesh Network (WMN) is an emerging low cost, decentralized community-based broadband technology, which is based on self-healing and multi-hop deployment of Access Points (APs), so that to increase the coverage area with maximum freedom to end-users to join or leave the network from anywhere anytime having low deployment and maintenance cost. Such kind of decentralized structure and multihop architecture increases its security vulnerabilities especially against the APs. One of such possible security attack is the placement of cloned AP to create serious performance degradation in IEEE 802.11 WMN. In this paper, we discuss the different security vulnerabilities of AP in IEEE 802.11 WMN along with possible research directions. We also propose a mutual cooperation mechanism between the multi-hop APs and serving gateway so that to detect and prevent the possibility of cloned AP. In this way the large scale exploitation of IEEE 802.11 WMN can be eliminated

Tornado Attack on RC4 with Applications to WEP & WPA

In this paper, we construct several tools for building and manipulating pools of biases in the analysis of RC4. We report extremely fast and optimized active and passive attacks against IEEE 802.11 wireless communication protocol WEP and a key recovery and a distinguishing attack against WPA. This was achieved through a huge amount of theoretical and experimental analysis (capturing WiFi packets), refinement and optimization of all the former known attacks and methodologies against RC4 stream cipher in WEP and WPA modes. We support all our claims on WEP by providing an implementation of this attack as a publicly available patch on Aircrack-ng. Our new attack improves its success probability drastically. Our active attack, based on ARP injection, requires 22500 packets to gain success probability of 50\% against a 104-bit WEP key, using Aircrack-ng in non-interactive mode. It runs in less than 5 seconds on an off-the-shelf PC. Using the same number of packets, Aicrack-ng yields around 3\% success rate. Furthermore, we describe very fast passive only attacks by just eavesdropping TCP/IPv4 packets in a WiFi communication. Our passive attack requires 27500 packets. This is much less than the number of packets Aircrack-ng requires in active mode (around 37500), which is a huge improvement. Deploying a similar theory, we also describe several attacks on WPA. Firstly, we describe a distinguisher for WPA with complexity 2^{42} and advantage 0.5 which uses 2^{42} packets. Then, based on several partial temporary key recovery attacks, we recover the full 128-bit temporary key of WPA by using 2^{42} packets. It works with complexity 2^{96}. So far, this is the best key recovery attack against WPA. We believe that our analysis brings on further insight to the security of RC4

Is Your Wireless Network Being Hacked?

Wireless networks provide vulnerable gateways for unauthorised entry to networks or even a standalone wireless computer. The independent radio signals that constitute wireless communications have no physical boundary to keep them in check. This allows a third party to easily eavesdrop on communications sessions and by capturing the data packets, they can break the encryption keys and access the data within the network. The public awareness of the insecurity of wireless networks is surprisingly poor despite frequent news media reports of the vulnerabilities of the equipment and the activities of the criminals prepare to exploit it. In this paper we review the security protocols commonly used on wireless networks and investigate their weaknesses by showing how easy it is to crack the codes using tools freely available on the Internet

Wi-Fi Security Analysis

AbstractIn recent years, a significant increasing in development of Wireless networks is noticed; they become an entire part of the Internet and demonstrate effectiveness in handling communication for reduced public LAN and military applications. This is mainly due to their mobility and low cost solutions; nevertheless, they are also prone to several attacks related to data integrity, Deni of Service and eavesdropping. This paper discusses wireless security protocols, their limitations and weakness. We present also an overview of the FMS (Fluhrer, Mantin, Shamir), a recovery key attack and demonstrate its effectiveness in reducing the average number of intercept packets based on a well choice of IV (initialization vectors). Some comparative experiments on ciphertext-only attacks were performed in order to study the efficiency of such technique and underline encountered difficulties

RC4 Encryption-A Literature Survey

AbstractA chronological survey demonstrating the cryptanalysis of RC4 stream cipher is presented in this paper. We have summarized the various weaknesses of RC4 algorithm followed by the recently proposed enhancements available in the literature. It is established that innovative research efforts are required to develop secure RC4 algorithm, which can remove the weaknesses of RC4, such as biased bytes, key collisions, and key recovery attacks on WPA. These flaws in RC4 are still offering an open challenge for developers. Hence our chronological survey corroborates the fact that even though researchers are working on RC4 stream cipher since last two decades, it still offers a plethora of research issues. The attraction of community towards RC4 is still alive

SAFETY AND SECURITY PROBLEMS OF BASIC WIRELESS NETWORK PROTECTION PROTOCOLS IN EVERYDAY LIFE

This paper deals with the topic of safety and security of wireless networks in the Republic of Croatia, specifically in the town of Sisak (Sisačko – moslavačka županija). Types of protective protocols that users mostly use and some of the features of these technologies. Some of the major problems in the security of those technologies and the ways in which these risks can be prevented. Free tools that can infiltrate the system and thus jeopardize the privacy and security of users. About criminal law of unauthorized access and identity theft related to wireless devices. Also on the prevalence of unprotected devices by some of the largest districts in the city of Sisak, which will be illustrated and described in this paper

WPA 2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access 2) Security Enhancement: Analysis

WPA and WPA2 (Wi-Fi Protected Access) is a certification program developed by the Wi-Fi Alliance to indicate compliance with the security protocol created by the WiFi Alliance to secure wireless networks. The Alliance defined the protocol in response to several weaknesses researchers had found in the previous system: Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). Many sophisticated authentication and encryption techniques have been embedded into WPA2 but it still facing a lot of challenging situations. In this paper we discuss the benefit of WPA2, its vulnerabilit

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

Healthcare Equity: Questions of Access and Security

Abstract The rapid growth of mobile technology to improve healthcare conditions, support patient engagement, and enhance patient education is expected to continue¬ its upward trend. Physicians feel that simplified access to health information is one of the greatest benefits of technology. This research connects the growth of patients’ healthcare data access via mobile applications and the growth of access to wireless communication. This article proposes the following questions to investigate potential healthcare equity barriers: “What is the available Wi-Fi coverage?” and “What types of security protocols are used in the wireless access points?” The results indicate that there is a difference in community access to available Wi-Fi coverage. This difference could influence healthcare equity barriers. In addition, communities had identical security protocol usage. This indicates an opportunity to improve knowledge of security protocols and maintenance of access points, as well as influences on health care equity barriers