Abstract
Academic and commercial 802.11 hotspots often use an SSL-secured captive portal to authenticate clients. Captive portals provide good usability and interoperability, but poor security. After a captive portal has authenticated a client, session hijacking and freeloading allow attackers to capture or use the client’s session. Freeloading does not require special tools and, surprisingly, is strengthened by the (widely recommended) use of personal firewalls. We propose and evaluate novel defenses against these attacks, session id checking and MAC sequence number tracking, both of which are transparent to clients and do not require changes in client computers. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed defenses are effective against the mentioned attacks and have little overhead.
This project was funded in part by the Pittsburgh Digital Greenhouse through a grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, Department of Community and Economic Development.
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Keywords
- Medium Access Control
- Access Point
- Unauthorized Access
- Network Interface Card
- Medium Access Control Address
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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Xia, H., Brustoloni, J. (2004). Detecting and Blocking Unauthorized Access in Wi-Fi Networks. In: Mitrou, N., Kontovasilis, K., Rouskas, G.N., Iliadis, I., Merakos, L. (eds) Networking 2004. NETWORKING 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3042. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24693-0_65
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24693-0_65
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