ARQ Secrecy: From Theory to Practice

TL;DR

This paper introduces a practical security overlay for 802.11 networks leveraging ARQ to defend against WEP vulnerabilities, demonstrating effective secrecy in real-world scenarios.

Contribution

It presents a novel ARQ-based secrecy scheme that enhances WEP security without requiring hardware changes or complex modifications.

Findings

Defends against all known passive WEP attacks

Achieves vanishing secrecy outage probability in realistic scenarios

Implemented on madwifi-ng driver for validation

Abstract

Inspired by our earlier work on Automatic Repeat reQuest (ARQ) secrecy, we propose a simple, yet efficient, security overlay protocol to existing 802.11 networks. Our work targets networks secured by the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol because of its widespread use and vulnerability to a multitude of security threats. By exploiting the existing ARQ protocol in the 802.11 standard, our proposed opportunistic secrecy scheme is shown to defend against all known passive WEP attacks. Moreover, our implementation on the madwifi-ng driver is used to establish the achievability of a vanishing secrecy outage probability in several realistic scenarios.