Proactive attacker localization in wireless LAN

Abstract

This paper addresses the open problem of locating an attacker that intentionally hides or falsifies its position using advanced radio technologies. A novel attacker localization mechanism, called Access Point Coordinated Localization (APCL), is proposed for IEEE 802.11 networks. APCL actively forces the attacker to reveal its position information by combining access point (AP) coordination with the traditional range-free localization. The optimal AP coordination process is calculated by modeling it as a finite horizon discrete Markov decision process, which is efficiently solved by an approximation algorithm. The performance advantages are verified through extensive simulations.