Experimental Assessment of Wireless LANs against Rogue Access Points

Abstract

Access Points (AP) are traditionally used to provide cost-effective, high speed Wi-Fi connectivity to homes, organizations and communities. Despite Wi-Fi providing numerous benefits such as flexibility, scalability and ease of deployment, it is susceptible to numerous vulnerabilities due to the presence of rogue access points (Rogue AP). In particular, intruders can eavesdrop, exploit, launch remote backdoors and manipulate legitimate clients and APs through Rogue APs thus leading to data breaches or possible network compromise. In this work, we build a real-time Wireless LAN testbed using commodity Wi-Fi devices such as Wi-Fi Pineapple Nano that acts as a rogue AP. Further, we perform different attacks on 802.11 Association process between clients and access points through the rogue AP and analyze their impact on the overall performance. Finally, we leverage a sniffer to capture genuine and malicious traffic and develop a mechanism for signature-based detection for mitigating the attacks caused by rogue APs. Evaluation shows that the proposed signature-based approach effectively detects the attacks caused by rogue APs with a detection rate of 91%.