Abstract
Media access control (MAC) addresses in wireless networks can be trivially spoofed using off-the-shelf devices. The aim of this research is to detect MAC address spoofing in wireless networks using a hard-to-spoof measurement that is correlated to the location of the wireless device, namely the received signal strength (RSS). We developed a passive solution that does not require modification for standards or protocols. The solution was tested in a live test-bed (i.e., a wireless local area network with the aid of two air monitors acting as sensors) and achieved 99.77%, 93.16% and 88.38% accuracy when the attacker is 8–13 m, 4–8 m and less than 4 m away from the victim device, respectively. We implemented three previous methods on the same test-bed and found that our solution outperforms existing solutions. Our solution is based on an ensemble method known as random forests.
Highlights
The usage of wireless networks, such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and wireless local area networks (WLANs), have grown in recent years
Address of a productive access point (AP) in WLAN-infrastructure mode and replace or coexist with that AP to eavesdrop on the wireless traffic or act as a man-in-the-middle [2,3,4,5,6]
We develop a new passive technique to detect media access control (MAC) address spoofing based on the random forests ensemble method
Summary
The usage of wireless networks, such as wireless sensor networks (WSNs) and wireless local area networks (WLANs), have grown in recent years. The media access control (MAC) address identifies wireless devices in wireless networks, yet it is susceptible to identity-based attacks. An attacker can spoof the MAC address of a productive access point (AP) in WLAN-infrastructure mode and replace or coexist with that AP to eavesdrop on the wireless traffic or act as a man-in-the-middle (this attack is known as the evil twin attack) [2,3,4,5,6]. The attacker can flood the network with numerous requests using random MAC addresses to exhaust the network resources. This attack is known as resource depletion [7,8,9]
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