802.11ac Device Identification based on MAC Frame Analysis

Abstract

In Wi-Fi networks, devices can be identified by physical features or MAC layer features, and the solutions of device identification can be used to enhance device authentication. Since 802.11ac Standard has been widely applied in Wi-Fi devices in recent years, the traditional identification methods designed for 802.11b/g/n devices will be no longer applicable. Therefore, it is necessary to design the corresponding 802.11ac device identification method. Compared with the physical feature-based method, the MAC layer-based method has advantages of low cost and easy deployment, so it has attracted more and more researchers' attention. In this paper, we use the fields from 802.11ac MAC frame as fingerprints. Through the analysis of 802.11ac MAC frame, a preprocessing method of the frame is proposed to mask strong and easy-to-modified identifiers. Then to overcome the difficulties caused by random changes in field values, we propose a device identification method based on the deep learning to select features automatically. Compared with the previous one using the transmitting rate as a feature, our method does not spend much time capturing packets in the device identification stage and has better performance whose average precision and recall exceed 99%.