Search Results (3)

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs), particularly Wi-Fi, serve as the backbone of modern connectivity, supporting billions of devices globally and forming a critical component in Internet of Things (IoT) ecosystems. However, the increasing ubiquity of WLANs also presents an expanding attack surface for adversaries—especially Advanced Persistent Threats (APTs), which operate with high levels of sophistication, resources, and long-term strategic objectives. This paper provides a holistic security analysis of WLANs under the lens of APT threat models, categorizing APT actors by capability tiers and examining their ability to compromise WLANs through logical attack surfaces. The study identifies and explores three primary attack surfaces: Radio Access Control interfaces, compromised insider nodes, and ISP gateway-level exposures. A series of empirical experiments—ranging from traffic analysis of ISP-controlled routers to offline password attack modeling—evaluate the current resilience of WLANs and highlight specific vulnerabilities such as credential reuse, firmware-based leakage, and protocol downgrade attacks. Furthermore, the paper demonstrates how APT resources significantly accelerate attacks through formal models of computational scaling. It also incorporates threat modeling frameworks, including STRIDE and MITRE ATT&CK, to contextualize risks and map adversary tactics. Based on these insights, this paper offers practical recommendations for enhancing WLAN resilience through improved authentication mechanisms, network segmentation, AI-based anomaly detection, and open firmware adoption. The findings underscore that while current WLAN implementations offer basic protections, they remain highly susceptible to well-resourced adversaries, necessitating a shift toward more robust, context-aware security architectures. Full article

Reliable source to sink communication is the most important factor for an efficient routing protocol especially in domains of military, healthcare and disaster recovery applications. We present weighted energy aware multipath reliable routing (WEAMR), a novel energy aware multipath routing protocol which utilizes hotline-assisted routing to meet such requirements for mission critical applications. The protocol reduces the number of average hops from source to destination and provides unmatched reliability as compared to well known reactive ad hoc protocols i.e., AODV and AOMDV. Our protocol makes efficient use of network paths based on weighted cost calculation and intelligently selects the best possible paths for data transmissions. The path cost calculation considers end to end number of hops, latency and minimum energy node value in the path. In case of path failure path recalculation is done efficiently with minimum latency and control packets overhead. Our evaluation shows that our proposal provides better end-to-end delivery with less routing overhead and higher packet delivery success ratio compared to AODV and AOMDV. The use of multipath also increases overall life time of WSN network using optimum energy available paths between sender and receiver in WDNs. Full article

An extremely reliable source to sink communication is required for most of the contemporary WSN applications especially pertaining to military, healthcare and disaster-recovery. However, due to their intrinsic energy, bandwidth and computational constraints, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) encounter several challenges in reliable source to sink communication. In this paper, we present a novel reliable topology that uses reliable hotlines between sensor gateways to boost the reliability of end-to-end transmissions. This reliable and efficient routing alternative reduces the number of average hops from source to the sink. We prove, with the help of analytical evaluation, that communication using hotlines is considerably more reliable than traditional WSN routing. We use reliability theory to analyze the cost and benefit of adding gateway nodes to a backbone-assisted WSN. However, in hotline assisted routing some scenarios where source and the sink are just a couple of hops away might bring more latency, therefore, we present a Signature Based Routing (SBR) scheme. SBR enables the gateways to make intelligent routing decisions, based upon the derived signature, hence providing lesser end-to-end delay between source to the sink communication. Finally, we evaluate our proposed hotline based topology with the help of a simulation tool and show that the proposed topology provides manifold increase in end-to-end reliability. Full article