Localization for Intrusion Detection in Wireless Local Area Networks

Abstract

On a wired network, authentication is implicitly provided by physical access; if a user is close enough to the network to plug in a cable, he must have gotten past the receptionist at the front door. While this is a weak definition of authentication, and one that is clearly inappropriate for high-security environments, it works reasonably well as long as the physical access control procedures are strong. Wireless Networks are attractive, in large part, because physical access is not required to use network resources. Therefore, a major component of maintaining network security is ensuring that stations attempting to associate with the network are allowed to do so. In this paper, we present a method to identify the location of wireless LAN users, and thus defend a "parking lot" attack.