Abstract
The last few years have seen explosive growth in deployment of Wireless Networks and use of Wireless devices. Advances in micro-technology and the need for ubiquitous services are the driving forces behind the ever growing popularity of Wireless networks. Unfortunately, IEEE 802.11 came under intense criticism since its standardization due to its design flaws. In Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), the Key Management protocol does not protect Management and Control frames. This vulnerability has drawn the attention of researchers in academia and also industry experts. In their quest for securing WLANs, several proposals both cryptographic and non-cryptographic have been advanced but none seem to be efficient. Since most adversaries will launch attack against Access Points (AP) in one way or the other, our work is based on the exploitation of small microscopic deviations called clock skews of APs. In our work, we reaffirmed that the clock skew of an AP can be used as it fingerprint and also went further to estimate the clock under different conditions and with varying network loads; changing fingerprinter location; rebooting AP. While our proposal does not detect fakeAps and Medium Access Control (MAC) address spoofing in its entirety, but we have shown that when AP is rebooted it takes time before the clock skew become consistent. The beauty of our works is that it does not add any overhead to the IEEE 802.11standard.