Spoofing Detection in Wireless Networks

Wireless spoofing attacks are easy to launch and can significantly impact the performance of networks. Although the identity of a node can be verified through cryptographic authentication, conventional security approaches are not always desirable because of their overhead requirements. Using spatial information the following are performed 1) detecting spoofing attacks; 2) determining the number of attackers when multiple adversaries masquerading as the same node identity; and 3) localizing multiple adversaries. Spatial information is a physical property associated with each node which is hard to falsify, and not reliant on cryptography. Spatial correlation of received signal strength (RSS) inherited from wireless nodes are used to detect the spoofing attacks. Cluster-based mechanisms are developed to determine the number of attackers. An integrated detection and localization system is proposed to localize the positions of multiple attackers. This integrated detection and localization system provides high accuracy of localizing multiple adversaries.