A nationwide census on wifi security threats: Prevalence, riskiness, and the economics

Di Gao; Hao Lin; Zhenhua Li; Feng Qian; Qi Alfred Chen; Zhiyun Qian; Wei Liu; Liangyi Gong; Yunhao Liu

doi:10.1145/3447993.3448620

A nationwide census on wifi security threats: Prevalence, riskiness, and the economics

Di Gao, Hao Lin, Zhenhua Li, Feng Qian, Qi Alfred Chen, Zhiyun Qian, Wei Liu, Liangyi Gong, Yunhao Liu

Computer Science and Engineering

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

6 Scopus citations

Abstract

Carrying over 75% of the last-mile mobile Internet traffic, WiFi has inevitably become an enticing target for various security threats. In this work, we characterize a wide variety of real-world WiFi threats at an unprecedented scale, involving 19 million WiFi access points (APs) mostly located in China, by deploying a crowdsourced security checking system on 14 million mobile devices in the wild. Leveraging the collected data, we reveal the landscape of nationwide WiFi threats for the first time. We find that the prevalence, riskiness, and breakdown of WiFi threats deviate significantly from common understandings and prior studies. In particular, we detect attacks at around 4% of all WiFi APs, uncover that most WiFi attacks are driven by an underground economy, and provide strong evidence of web analytics platforms being the bottleneck of its monetization chain. Further, we provide insightful guidance for defending against WiFi attacks at scale, and some of our efforts have already yielded real-world impact - -effectively disrupted the WiFi attack ecosystem.

Original language	English (US)
Title of host publication	ACM MobiCom 2021 - Proceedings of the 27th ACM Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking
Publisher	Association for Computing Machinery
Pages	242-255
Number of pages	14
ISBN (Electronic)	9781450383424
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1145/3447993.3448620
State	Published - Sep 9 2021
Event	27th ACM Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking, MobiCom 2021 - New Orleans, United States Duration: Oct 25 2021 → Oct 29 2021

Publication series

Name	Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking

Conference

Conference	27th ACM Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking, MobiCom 2021
Country/Territory	United States
City	New Orleans
Period	10/25/21 → 10/29/21

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We sincerely thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and detailed comments, as well as the shepherd for guiding us through the revision process. We also appreciate Prof. Tianyin Xu for his valuable advice and participation in the early stage of the study. This work is supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China under grant 2018YFB1004700, the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) under grants 61822205, 61632020, 61632013 and 61902211, and the Beijing National Research Center for Information Science and Technology (BNRist).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 ACM.

Keywords

countermeasures
threat ecosystem
wifi & mobile security

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Publisher link

10.1145/3447993.3448620

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Cite this

Gao, D., Lin, H., Li, Z., Qian, F., Chen, Q. A., Qian, Z., Liu, W., Gong, L., & Liu, Y. (2021). A nationwide census on wifi security threats: Prevalence, riskiness, and the economics. In ACM MobiCom 2021 - Proceedings of the 27th ACM Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking (pp. 242-255). (Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3447993.3448620

A nationwide census on wifi security threats: Prevalence, riskiness, and the economics. / Gao, Di; Lin, Hao; Li, Zhenhua et al.
ACM MobiCom 2021 - Proceedings of the 27th ACM Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking. Association for Computing Machinery, 2021. p. 242-255 (Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking).

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Conference contribution

Gao, D, Lin, H, Li, Z, Qian, F, Chen, QA, Qian, Z, Liu, W, Gong, L & Liu, Y 2021, A nationwide census on wifi security threats: Prevalence, riskiness, and the economics. in ACM MobiCom 2021 - Proceedings of the 27th ACM Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking. Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking, Association for Computing Machinery, pp. 242-255, 27th ACM Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking, MobiCom 2021, New Orleans, United States, 10/25/21. https://doi.org/10.1145/3447993.3448620

Gao D, Lin H, Li Z, Qian F, Chen QA, Qian Z et al. A nationwide census on wifi security threats: Prevalence, riskiness, and the economics. In ACM MobiCom 2021 - Proceedings of the 27th ACM Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking. Association for Computing Machinery. 2021. p. 242-255. (Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking). doi: 10.1145/3447993.3448620

Gao, Di ; Lin, Hao ; Li, Zhenhua et al. / A nationwide census on wifi security threats : Prevalence, riskiness, and the economics. ACM MobiCom 2021 - Proceedings of the 27th ACM Annual International Conference On Mobile Computing And Networking. Association for Computing Machinery, 2021. pp. 242-255 (Proceedings of the 27th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking).

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A nationwide census on wifi security threats: Prevalence, riskiness, and the economics

Abstract

Publication series

Conference

Bibliographical note

Keywords

UN SDGs

Publisher link

Find It

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