On Eavesdropping Attacks in Wireless Networks

Eavesdropping attacks have become one of major threats in wireless networks since it is the prerequisite of other malicious attacks. Most of current studies concentrate on designing anti-eavesdropping schemes. There are few studies on quantitatively evaluating the eavesdropping attacks conducted by the malicious nodes. However, it is important to investigate the eavesdropping attacks since we can design cost-effective antieavesdropping schemes if we know the eavesdropping behaviors. For example, we can offer a better protection on the confidential communications if we know which location is more vulnerable to eavesdropping attacks. In this paper, we propose a general analytical framework to quantify the eavesdropping probability in wireless networks with consideration of various factors, such as node density and impacts of channel conditions. We validate the accuracy of our proposed model by conducting extensive simulations. Besides, we show that our general model can also be used to underwater acoustic networks.