SWOON: a testbed for secure wireless overlay networks

Abstract

There is strong demand for solutions to security problems in various wireless networks, such as WiFi, WiMAX, 3GPP and WSN, not only for the individual networks themselves but also for the integration of these networks. A complete solution cannot be proposed by piecemeal proposals but requires a holistic examination of all security concerns. The solution requires assessment tools, such as wireless testbeds for designing and testing wireless security technologies. We describe a comprehensive and flexible wireless testbed allowing designers to test their systems without actually building a physical test environment. Moreover, such a testbed can also shorten the test cycle and the time to market. Our SWOON testbed uses two experimental nodes to simulate one single wireless node. Such a pairing design helps reduce the porting efforts of wireless drivers and thus increase the flexibility for adapting various wireless interfaces in the SWOON testbed. We verify the feasibility and stability of the SWOON testbed by conducting distributed denial of service (DDoS) and eavesdropping experiments. In the future, the SWOON testbed will be extended to support heterogeneous wireless networks, such as WSN, WiMAX or 3GPP.