An Anti-sniffing Protocol for Location-based Services in Wireless Networks

In Wi-Fi networks, a user’s location can be determined through the access points (APs) in the network. These kinds of location-based services, LBS, use a calculation of trilateration from the distance away from three routers. This distance is most often determined with received signal strength indication, RSSI. Wi-Fi communications are broadcasted, and RSSI is contained in the header of a packet. As a consequence, simple packet sniffing attacks make it relatively easy for malicious users to track a user’s location. In order to increase the security of using LBS, this paper proposes a new algorithm for channel hopping of the routers. In this work, the algorithm is tested for its effectiveness at increasing the difficulty for the malicious user to determine the location of the LBS user. The simulation results support the hypothesis that channel hopping significantly increases the effort needed for the malicious user to track the user, at an acceptable cost of LBS efficiency.