Rogue access point localization using particle swarm optimization

Abstract

Determining the location of a rogue access point is an important research problem due to the security threats it imposes. Rogue access points can be used to carry out different types of attacks such as man-in-the-middle, denial of service, and building a private channel for information theft. The main contribution of this research is a novel efficient approach to locate a rogue access points using Particle Swarm Optimization. In this paper, the received signal strength is used to estimate the distance between the access point transmitter and number of known locations around it. The set of received signal strength samples, along with their corresponding known locations, is used as an input to a customized Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. The algorithm searches for the optimal location of the access point that matches the given sample set. The proposed approach was evaluated via simulation and was shown to estimate the location of the rogue access point quickly and precisely in different practical scenarios. Comparative analysis demonstrated that the proposed approach can prominently outperform the state-of-the-art techniques.