WiFi is the dominant means for home Internet access, yet is frequently a performance bottleneck. Without reliable, satisfactory performance at the last hop, end-to-end quality of service (QoS) efforts will fail. Three major reasons for WiFi bottlenecking performance are its: 1) inherent wireless channel characteristics, 2) approach to access control of the shared broadcast channel, and 3) impact on transport layer protocols, such as TCP, that operate end-to-end, and over-react to the loss or delay caused by the single WiFi link.
In this paper, we leverage the philosophy of centralization in modern networking and present our cross layer design to address the problem. Specifically, we introduce centralized control at the point of entry/egress into the WiFi network. Based on network conditions measured from buffer sizes, airtime and throughput, flows are scheduled to the optimal utility. Unlike most existing WiFi QoS approaches, {\em our design only relies on transparent modifications, requiring no changes to the network (including link layer) protocols, applications, or user intervention}. Through extensive experimental investigation, we show that our design significantly enhances the reliability and predictability of WiFi performance, providing a ``virtual wire''-like link to the targeted application.
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Analysis of Rogue Access Points Using SDR
When people connect to the Internet with their mobile devices, they do not often think about the security of their data; however, the prevalence of rogue access points has taken advantage of a false sense of safety in unsuspecting victims. This paper analyzes the methods an attacker would use to create rogue WiFi access points using software-defined radio (SDR). To construct a rogue access point, a few essential layers of WiFi need simulation: the physical layer, link layer, network layer, and transport layer. Radio waves carrying WiFi packets, transmitted between two Universal Software Radio Peripherals (USRPs), emulate the physical layer. The link layer consists of the connection between those same USRPs communicating directly to each other, and the network layer expands on this communication by using the network tunneling/network tapping (TUN/TAP) interfaces to tunnel IP packets between the host and the access point. Finally, the establishment of the transport layer constitutes transceiving the packets that pass through the USRPs. In the end, we found that creating a rogue access point and capturing the stream of data from a fabricated "victim" on the Internet was effective and cheap with SDRs as inexpensive as $20 USD. Our work aims to expose how a cybercriminal could carry out an attack like this in order to prevent and defend against them in the future.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1757781
- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10157751
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- 2019 IEEE International Conference on Industrial Internet (ICII)
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 50 to 55
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
-
Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1109/ICII.2019.00020
