Integration of SDR and UAS for Malicious Wi-Fi Hotspots Detection

With the explosive growth in the number of smartphones and other mobile devices, free Wi-Fi service has become very attractive to these devices’ users. Due to the high demands of Internet services for mobile users, many public locations offer free Wi-Fi services today, such as restaurants, shopping malls, events, etc. However, the prevalent free Wi-Fi service also introduces additional hacking channels for malicious entities by deploying fake Wi-Fi access points. While research efforts have been spent on detecting rogue Wi-Fi access points, the mobility of existing systems are very limited, and hence making them inefficient to cover multiple locations.In this paper, we propose an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based detection system for rogue Wi-Fi access points. By uniquely leveraging the high mobility feature of UAVs and wireless analysis feature of software-defined radio (SDR), our system turbocharges the efficiency and coverage of detecting rogue Wi-Fi access points.