Study Examines WiFi Attacks and Security Responses

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Study Examines WiFi Attacks and Security Responses

Posted by Asha 613 days ago (http://www.newsfactor.com)

U.S. researchers say they can measure how seriously differing types of attacks would disrupt a Wi-Fi network -- a step toward improved security technologies.

Wi-Fi networks, allowing computer users to access the Internet via radio signals, are commonplace in both large businesses and at local coffee shops, and are becoming more and more important for both business and personal communication, researchers at North Carolina State University said in a release Monday.

The researchers examined two Wi-Fi attack types -- persistent attacks, in which the attack persists non-stop until it can be identified and disabled, and intermittent attacks, which block access on a periodic basis, making them harder to identify and stop. They developed a measure called an "order gain" to compare the impact of the attack strategies in various scenarios.

For example, if an attacker has an 80 percent chance of accessing the network, and other users have the other 20 percent, the order gain would be 4.

A Wi-Fi network can only serve a single computer at a time, and normally functions by rapidly cycling through requests from multiple computers. Therefore, attacks work by giving the attacker greater access to the network, which effectively blocks other users.

"If we want to design effective countermeasures," Wenye Wang, N.C. State professor of electrical and computer engineering, said, "we have to target the attacks that can cause the most disruption.

"It`s impossible to prevent every conceivable attack," she said.

Countermeasures should focus on continuous attacks that target networks with large numbers of users, because that scenario represents the largest order gain, the researchers said.

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Infotech | study examines wifi attacks security responses