Multi Parameter Based Robust and Efficient Rogue AP Detection Approach

Abstract

Wireless LANs are an integral part of todays globalized economy. WLANs are growing and so are their threats. The main security threat in a wireless network is a malicious or rogue access point (RAP). It is also observed that out of total available access points (AP) on the network, almost 20% APs are unauthorized. Existing research methods use diverse parameters such as clock skew, wireless traffic monitoring, encryption, authorization, timing based approach, RSS analysis, bottleneck bandwidth analysis, and sequential hypothesis test. The limitations of the existing methods include; weak clock skew solution assumption; variable inter packet arrival time; mobile agent code cannot be installed on all nodes; MAC and SSID address can be spoofed; variable received signal strength; the system will not work properly if central server is down. These limitations have motivated us to develop a multi parameter based technique to improve the detection of RAP in WLAN. From the results it is observed that the developed multi-parameter based method shows improvement in terms of time required for detecting RAP. Detection time is improved by 37.33%, in comparison to the different methods.