City-Hunter: Hunting Smartphones in Urban Areas

Xuefeng LIU, Jiaqi WEN, Shaojie TANG, Jiannong CAO, Jiaxing SHEN

Research output: Book Chapters | Papers in Conference ProceedingsConference paper (refereed)Researchpeer-review

2 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

The security issue of public WiFi is gaining more and more concern. By listening to probe requests, an adversary can obtain the SSID list of the APs to which a smartphone previously connected, and utilizes this information to trick the smartphone into associating to it. However, with the enhancement of security level, most smartphones now do not proactively disclose their SSID lists, making these attacks obsolete. In this paper, we propose City-Hunter, an attacker that can lure nearby smartphones without knowing their SSID information. City-Hunter establishes and maintains an SSID database by integrating both offline and online information. Meanwhile, it smartly chooses some SSIDs to hit a smartphone according to the past record and freshness. We evaluate the performance of City-Hunter in different public places. The results demonstrate that City-Hunter is able to successfully hit 12% ∼ 18% smartphones without knowing their SSID information, which is about 4 ∼ 8 times improvement compared to the similar attacks like KARMA and MANA.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS)
EditorsKisung LEE, Ling LIU
PublisherIEEE
Pages162-171
Number of pages10
ISBN (Electronic)9781538617922
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017
Externally publishedYes
Event37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2017 - Atlanta, United States
Duration: 5 Jun 20178 Jun 2017

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Distributed Computing Systems

Conference

Conference37th IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems, ICDCS 2017
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityAtlanta
Period5/06/178/06/17

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