ANALYSIS OF WIRELESS CLIENTS’ SECURITY

Abstract

For today, each of us is using wireless communication capabilities. Almost anywhere in cities such as Moscow you can find an access point and access to the Internet. Often people use open access points in transport, parks, shopping centers or cafes. But in such cases, wireless network clients are particularly at risk of being attacked by intruders and losing personal data. This article discusses the security of wireless clients, as well as the vulnerability of wireless Wi-Fi networks. This vulnerability can be exploited as a result of the new library features for capturing network traffic named as libpcap. This library allows not only to intercept the traffic of wireless networks, but also to send packets to the network using the network card driver. The article describes the method of amplifying the signal of access points, as well as disconnecting wireless clients from the network and further reconnecting them to unauthorized access points. This study illustrates the possible scheme of the attacker's actions and the situation of the attack on the client. The result of the study is the answer to the question whether the ability to send packets to the network programmatically is a potential threat to customers. The information obtained as a result of research and data collection is processed. The article also contains statistics on the successful amplification of the signal strength of the access point and the statistics of successful reconnection of clients to an access point with a weak signal strength, which was increased by the attacker programmatically. The statistics are for customers with different versions of the Android OS, depending on the characteristics of the software that a potential attacker may use to perform this type of attack.

Keywords

• Wireless networks
• Wi-Fi
• weakness
• access point
• authentication
• security