research-article

Improving wireless privacy with an identifier-free link layer protocol

Authors:

Ben Greenstein,

Tadayoshi Kohno,

Srinivasan Seshan,

David WetherallAuthors Info & Claims

MobiSys '08: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services

Pages 40 - 53

https://doi.org/10.1145/1378600.1378607

Published: 17 June 2008 Publication History

Abstract

We present the design and evaluation of an 802.11-like wireless link layer protocol that obfuscates all transmitted bits to increase privacy. This includes explicit identifiers such as MAC addresses, the contents of management messages, and other protocol fields that the existing 802.11 protocol relies on to be sent in the clear. By obscuring these fields, we greatly increase the difficulty of identifying or profiling users from their transmissions in ways that are otherwise straightforward. Our design, called SlyFi, is nearly as efficient as existing schemes such as WPA for discovery, link setup, and data delivery despite its heightened protections; transmission requires only symmetric key encryption and reception requires a table lookup followed by symmetric key decryption. Experiments using our implementation on Atheros 802.11 drivers show that SlyFi can discover and associate with networks faster than 802.11 using WPA-PSK. The overhead SlyFi introduces in packet delivery is only slightly higher than that added by WPA-CCMP encryption (10% vs. 3% decrease in throughput).

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Razmjoui PKavousi-Fard AJin TDabbaghjamanesh MKarimi MJolfaei A(2024)A Blockchain-Based Mutual Authentication Method to Secure the Electric Vehicles’ TPMSIEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics10.1109/TII.2023.325729420:1(158-168)Online publication date: Jan-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2023.3257294
Guo T(2024)Exploring Physical-Layer Anti-Privacy-Theft Capacity in Wireless NetworksICC 2024 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10622868(103-108)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10622868
Zhou QPandey OYe F(2022)An Approach for Multi-Level Visibility Scoping of IoT Services in Enterprise EnvironmentsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2020.301287521:2(408-420)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2020.3012875
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Index Terms

Improving wireless privacy with an identifier-free link layer protocol
1. Hardware
  1. Communication hardware, interfaces and storage
2. Networks
  1. Network types
    1. Mobile networks
    2. Wireless access networks

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cover image ACM Conferences

MobiSys '08: Proceedings of the 6th international conference on Mobile systems, applications, and services

June 2008

304 pages

ISBN:9781605581392

DOI:10.1145/1378600

General Chairs:
Dirk Grunwald
University of Colorado, USA
,
Richard Han
University of Colorado, USA
,
Program Chairs:
Eyal de Lara
University of Toronto, Canada
,
Carla Ellis
Duke University, USA

Copyright © 2008 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 17 June 2008

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Mobisys08: The 6th International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

June 17 - 20, 2008

CO, Breckenridge, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 274 of 1,679 submissions, 16%

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https://doi.org/10.1109/TII.2023.3257294
Guo T(2024)Exploring Physical-Layer Anti-Privacy-Theft Capacity in Wireless NetworksICC 2024 - IEEE International Conference on Communications10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10622868(103-108)Online publication date: 9-Jun-2024
https://doi.org/10.1109/ICC51166.2024.10622868
Zhou QPandey OYe F(2022)An Approach for Multi-Level Visibility Scoping of IoT Services in Enterprise EnvironmentsIEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing10.1109/TMC.2020.301287521:2(408-420)Online publication date: 1-Feb-2022
https://doi.org/10.1109/TMC.2020.3012875
DZIUBINSKI KBANDAI M(2021)Bandwidth Efficient IoT Traffic Shaping Technique for Protecting Smart Home Privacy from Data Breaches in Wireless LANIEICE Transactions on Communications10.1587/transcom.2020EBP3182E104.B:8(961-973)Online publication date: 1-Aug-2021
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Gu XWu WGu XLing ZYang MSong A(2020)Probe Request Based Device Identification Attack and DefenseSensors10.3390/s2016462020:16(4620)Online publication date: 17-Aug-2020
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Cao YAtya ASingh SQian ZKrishnamurthy SPorta TKrishnamurthy PMarvel L(2020)Packet Header Obfuscation Using MIMOIEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking10.1109/TNET.2020.2998398(1-14)Online publication date: 2020
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Chakrabarty SEngels D(2020)Secure Smart Cities Framework Using IoT and AI2020 IEEE Global Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Internet of Things (GCAIoT)10.1109/GCAIoT51063.2020.9345912(1-6)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2020
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