A Timing-Based Scheme for Rogue AP Detection

Abstract

This paper considers a category of rogue access points (APs) that pretend to be legitimate APs to lure users to connect to them. We propose a practical timing-based technique that allows the user to avoid connecting to rogue APs. Our detection scheme is a client-centric approach that employs the round trip time between the user and the DNS server to independently determine whether an AP is a rogue AP without assistance from the WLAN operator. We implemented our detection technique on commercially available wireless cards to evaluate their performance. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the accuracy, effectiveness, and robustness of our approach. The algorithm achieves close to 100 percent accuracy in distinguishing rogue APs from legitimate APs in lightly loaded traffic conditions, and larger than 60 percent accuracy in heavy traffic conditions. At the same time, the detection only requires less than 1 second for lightly-loaded traffic conditions and tens of seconds for heavy traffic conditions.