4th International ICST Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and Robustness

Research Article

RAP: Protecting Commodity Wi-Fi Networks from Rogue Access Points

  • @INPROCEEDINGS{10.1145/1577222.1577252,
        author={Liran Ma and Amin Y. Teymorian and Xiuzhen Cheng and Min Song},
        title={RAP: Protecting Commodity Wi-Fi Networks from Rogue Access Points},
        proceedings={4th International ICST Conference on Heterogeneous Networking for Quality, Reliability, Security and  Robustness},
        publisher={ACM},
        proceedings_a={QSHINE},
        year={2007},
        month={8},
        keywords={},
        doi={10.1145/1577222.1577252}
    }
    
  • Liran Ma
    Amin Y. Teymorian
    Xiuzhen Cheng
    Min Song
    Year: 2007
    RAP: Protecting Commodity Wi-Fi Networks from Rogue Access Points
    QSHINE
    ACM
    DOI: 10.1145/1577222.1577252
Liran Ma1,*, Amin Y. Teymorian1,*, Xiuzhen Cheng1,*, Min Song2,*
  • 1: Department of Computer Science The George Washington University Washington, DC 20052, USA
  • 2: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering Old Dominion University Norfolk, VA 23529, USA.
*Contact email: lrma@gwu.edu, amin@gwu.edu, cheng@gwu.edu, msong@odu.edu

Abstract

We first give a comprehensive taxonomy of rouge access points (APs), which includes a new class of rouge APs never addressed in the literature before. Then, we propose an efficient rogue AP protection system termed as RAP for commodity Wi-Fi networks. In RAP, novel techniques are introduced to detect rouge APs and to improve network resilience. Our system has the following nice properties: i) it requires neither specialized hardware nor modification to existing standards; ii) the proposed mechanism can be integrated with an AP in a plugin manner; iii) it provides a costeffective security enhancement toWi-Fi networks by incorporating free but mature software tools; iv) it can protect the network from adversaries capable of using customized equipment and violating the IEEE 802.11 standard.