DDoS attack exploiting location information and its mitigation over wireless networks

Abstract

The explosive proliferation of the smart mobile devices drives massive growth in the wireless data communication. In order to provide wireless data communication for the smart hand-held devices, a large number of base stations including access points (APs) based on IEEE 802.11 (WiFi) have been densely deployed. While widespread deployment and expansion of wireless network infrastructure brings the wireless data communication ubiquitously, it has also introduced many security challenges such as Denial of Service (DoS), malicious mobile code, etc., surrounding wireless networks. In this dissertation, we present a novel Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack model exploiting smart mobile device`s location information simultaneously with utilizing active scanning vulnerability in wireless network. Also we provide the simulation result of this attack model in order to evaluate a proof-of-concept of our attack model and show that relatively small number of attacker with tiny volume of active scanning traffic is sufficient to totally interrupt wireless communication. Also we propose a location information protection method based on chameleon hash scheme for a mitigation method against our DDoS attack model. For constructing our DDoS attack model, an attacker who desires to aggress on the wireless network propagates a malicious code in users` smart mobile device. It becomes a zombie device of botnets which is stealthy controlled by C&C servers. After the botnet master issues the attack command, the zombie devices activate their smart active discovery attack, in case of WiFi probe request which is a basic attack unit to evaluate our model. The decisive distinction between existing active discovery attack such as Probe Request Flooding (PRF) and our attack is that there is no clear classification to decide whether normal active discovery protocol or not, due to the tiny volume traffic and reasonable interval of the request message. Furthermore, our attack can be...