NoPTPeer:Protecting Android Devices from Stealthy Spoofing and Stealing in WLANs without Privilege

Android devices are prone to spoofing attacks in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), and many of them access numerous unknown networks in daily use. Moreover, because of the weak authentication between Android smartphones, attackers can steal data in a stealthier way based on Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) spoofing. These facts bring a gap in the study of device-side spoofing defense for Android devices. So in this paper a framework is proposed which requires No Privilege but can guarantee the True identity of Peers (NoPTPeer), to protect Android’s device-to-device communication in WLANs. Its main features include realizing strong authentication between Android devices, controlling dangerous outgoing connections, and monitoring suspicious incoming connections. These features are realized by an Identity-Based-Signature (IBS) scheme, an Android base class VpnService, and information read from Android system files, which all require no root privilege and are independent of network infrastructures. We implement this framework as an Android smartphone application. The experiments show its effectiveness in detecting spoofing and monitoring stealing, as well as acceptable overhead in memory, Central Processing Unit (CPU) usage and communication latency.