Detection of Misconfigured BYOD Devices in Wi-Fi Networks

Jaehyuk Choi
2020 Applied Sciences  
As Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policy has become widely accepted in the enterprise, anyone with a mobile device that supports Wi-Fi tethering can provide an active wireless Internet connection to other devices without restriction from network administrators. Despite the potential benefits of Wi-Fi tethering, it raises new security issues. The open source nature of mobile operating systems (e.g., Google Android or OpenWrt) can be easily manipulated by selfish users to provide an unfair
more » ... throughput performance to their tethered devices. The unauthorized tethering can interfere with nearby well-planned access points (APs) within Wi-Fi networks, which results in serious performance problems. In this paper, we first conduct an extensive evaluation study and demonstrate that the abuse of Wi-Fi tethering that adjusts the clear channel access parameters has strong adverse effects in Wi-Fi networks, while providing the manipulated device a high throughput gain. Subsequently, an online detection scheme diagnoses the network condition and detects selfish tethering devices by passively exploiting the packet loss information of on-going transmissions. Our evaluation results show that the proposed method accurately distinguishes the manipulated tethering behavior from other types of misbehavior, including the hidden node problem.
doi:10.3390/app10207203 fatcat:iqfkgnxeebcrpehpyrkp6hk5vm