Accurate rogue access point localization leveraging fine-grained channel information

Abstract

Rogue access point (AP) has emerged as an important security problem in WLANs. However, it is a challenge task to localize the rogue AP with both high accuracy and minimal infrastructure cost. Either expensive professional infrastructure (e.g., multiple wireless sniffers) or additional hardware (e.g., directional antenna) need to be pre-deployed for rogue AP localization with high cost. Moreover, existing methods using Received Signal Strength (RSS) result in large error as RSS is suffered from the multipath and shadowing effects in complex wireless environment. In this work, we exploit the channel state information (CSI), which is readily available from commercial Wi-Fi devices, to locate the rogue AP with high accuracy. We use only a single off-the-shelf Wi-Fi device for rogue AP localization which involves minimal infrastructure requirement. Our proposed rogue AP localization framework consists of two components: direction determination and position estimation. By characterizing time domain CSI amplitude, we develop direction determination approach to estimate the direction of the rogue AP at the Wi-Fi device. We further propose two schemes to estimate position of the rogue AP: directions determined at multiple locations grounded on triangulation, or walking towards the rogue AP with direction adjustment. Results from extensive experiments in both indoor and outdoor environments show that our framework can achieve more practical and accurate rogue AP localization when comparing with existing RSS-based approach.