An empirical study of WIFI security and performance in Morocco - wardriving in Rabat

Morocco is an important regional ICT player that offers interesting investment opportunities to many national and international companies. It is important for these companies to have a good understanding of network performance and security in Morocco. Unfortunately, however, most prior work on network performance and security is interested in countries other than Morocco. In this paper, we perform a field study of WIFI networks in Rabat, the capital of Morocco, using wardriving. Our study covers about 10,000 WIFI networks in residential and administrative neighborhoods in Rabat. We find that 77% networks use WPA or WPA2, indicating that WIFI security in Morocco is comparable to WIFI security in developed countries. We also find a balanced use of channels 1, 6, and 11 indicating that network operators are aware of high interferences that can occur on channel 6 and therefore act to minimize interferences. Overall, our results indicate that WiFi situation in the Rabat neighborhoods examined is very encouraging.