Countermeasures against MAC address spoofing in public wireless networks using lightweight agents

Abstract

As wireless network usage thrivingly grows, MAC address spoofing recently poses a serious security threat to a public wireless network. In the past, several schemes have been proposed to leverage this problem. However, these previous methods incur high deployment costs in employing countermeasure protocols. In this paper, we present a lightweight agent-based access control framework to counter MAC address spoofing threats. The proposed framework has four operating modes to run according to user needs of system performance and wireless security. Therefore, the framework provides much more flexibility in employing a variety of security protocols, and performance-security trade-offs. With a prototype implementation, the preliminary experimental results indicate that the proposed framework has only 20% performance degradation in burst packet transfer under the most rigorous security consideration, which shows the potential feasibility.