Assessment and Test-case Study of Wi-Fi Security through the Wardriving Technique

Abstract

This study aims to investigate Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) within the context of its applicability as a 21st-century business tool and its survivability in a security threat-infested cyber landscape. WLAN security leverages the Wardriving technique deployed within geolocation to scan for WLAN density and explore the associated security mechanisms. Specifically, the study adopts two approaches; the first part reviews relevant research articles in electronic libraries and databases on WLAN security based on wardriving techniques. The other part comprises a measurement campaign conducted in a mid-sized city in North Cyprus. The field measurement aims to underscore the claims from the literature to find out how the security encryption technologies are used. In particular, the goal is to determine the availability of WLAN infrastructure and monitor how the security measures are implemented in Northern Cyprus. The main objective is to determine the security state of WLAN in Cyprus and examine how it can be generalized for related environments. In order to completely grasp the research issue posed in this study, data analyses from several perspectives are analyzed and examined critically. The wardriving approach has been used in this work to crawl wider regions for examination. This study was conducted with security findings drawn only from publicly accessible information emitted by each investigated wireless access point. The channel usage, Service Set IDentifier (SSID) security, the Encryption type (Open, WEP, WPA, WPA2, WPA3, and Mixed mode), WPS usage statistics, geographical locations, detailed security statistics described in Wigle CSV format, and vendor statistics are highlighted. Generally, results indicate that 21,345 WLANs were detected. From the detected WLANs, 23 (0.1 percent) used WEP encryption, 18 (0.08 percent) used WPA-TKIP encryption, 5,359 (25.1 percent) were unencrypted, and a clear majority of 9,139 (42.82 percent) used the more secure WPA2 encryption, while 13 networks (0.06 percent) used the latest WPA3 encryption technique. The results imply that WLAN security in Cyprus can be said to be moderate. Thus, this study adds to the expanding corpus of research on WLAN security and Wardriving to all parties in the wireless security ecosystem. The current study examines WLAN operations in North Cyprus while pointing to future research directions on Wireless LAN security mechanisms. Overall, the dataset from the wardriving experiment is novel and would serve future research exploration in the wireless security systems domain.