When you’re planning out your castle in anticipation of a potential siege, it’s good to know what kinds of enemies you might be facing somewhere down the line. If you think Dracula is likely to attack, for instance, build a moat and the sorry old bloodsucker won’t be able to cross the water to get you. If you think werewolves might follow this vanquished foe (since lycanthropes and vampires seem to hang out in the same circles these days for some inexplicable reason), make sure the moat is well-stocked in crocodiles with silver-tipped dentistry lining their jagged mouthfuls. If Mickey Rourke is trying to box his way into your fortress, cover the walls with soap and watch him and his army of chihuahuas scamper away in fear. Superman can be kept at bay by bricks of Kryptonite. Fell the plans of Achilles with a remote controlled battery of heel-poking spears. You get the idea.
The closest most of us will come to defending a castle will be securing a Wi-Fi network from the schemes of would-be hackers, phishers, and scammers of every variety. As these villains have every manner of weapon at their disposal, and are often on the cutting edge of emerging security measures designed to keep them out of your business, you must adapt your strategy and try to stay at least a step ahead of them. Researchers at North Carolina State University have designed a new way to measure how vulnerable a Wi-Fi network is to the slings and arrows that might get hurled in its direction, and what the gravest consequences of such disruptions would be if they were successful in breaching its defenses.
Says team member Dr. Wenye Wang: “This information can be used to help us design more effective security systems, because it tells us which attacks — and which circumstances — are most harmful to Wi-Fi systems.”
Dr. Wang and her researchers have examined two of the most common types of attacks made on Wi-Fi networks: persistent attacks and intermittent attacks. A persistent attack will continue until it’s identified and stopped. An intermittent attack, on the other hand, makes its move to disrupt service on a network, and then sneaks back into the shadows like a ninja to reassert itself at an unknown time, which makes it harder to identify and disable. The research team made a comparison between these attacks along with variables that might occur from the attacking side as well as on the under-attack side — such as with the amount of users on a Wi-Fi network.
Using the information gained by making observations of these variable Wi-Fi attacks, the team was able to create a metric — an order gain — to measure the potential effects of attacks on a Wi-Fi network and ascertain the probability of valid network users against invalid (and possibly malicious) network users accessing that network. A Wi-Fi network can only serve one computer at a time, so it rapidly cycles through multiple requests to function. If a hacker has an 80 percent chance of breaching and gaining access to a Wi-Fi network, and legitimate users have a 20 percent chance, the order gain is four; the attacker has a four to one chance of access.
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