Abstract
WiFi hotspots often suffer from mediocre security, unreliable performance, limited access, and cumbersome authentication procedure. Specifically, public WiFi hotspots can rarely guarantee satisfactory speed and uptime, and their configuration often requires a complicated setup with subscription to a payment aggregator. Moreover, paid hotspots can neither protect clients against low quality or non-service after prepayment, nor do they provide an adequate defense against misuse by the clients. In this paper, we propose SmartWiFi, a universal, secure, and decentralized WiFi hotspot that can be deployed in any public or private environment. SmartWiFi provides cross-domain authentication, fully automated accounting and payments, and security assurance for both hotspots and clients. SmartWiFi utilizes a novel off-chain transaction scheme called Hash Chain-based Network Connectivity Satisfaction Acknowledgement (Hansa), which enables fast and low-cost provider-client protocol by restricting otherwise unacceptable delays and fees associated with blockchain interaction. In addition, we present DupSet, a dynamic user-perceived speed estimation technique, which can reliably evaluate the quality of Internet connection from the users’ perspective. We design and implement SmartWiFi desktop and mobile apps using an Ethereum smart contract. With extensive experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that SmartWiFi exhibits rapid execution with low communication overhead and reduced fees.
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Notes
- 1.
The name is inspired by the Hansa Trade League, which successfully operated under the power of mutual trust for over a century in a turbulent political and economic environment of Medieval Europe.
- 2.
We experimentally found that the third quartile statistic achieves a better measurement accuracy compared to mean, median, and maximum.
- 3.
We empirically determine that simple moving average over 6 periods (SMA-6) delivers stable and reliable results.
- 4.
The growing number of users incurs higher rate of physical layer packet collisions. One way to mitigate this is to use MIMO WiFi access point hardware.
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Acknowledgement
We would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for providing valuable feedback on our work. This work was supported in part by National Science Foundation grants CNS1950171 and CNS-1949753.
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Ivanov, N., Lou, J., Yan, Q. (2020). SmartWiFi: Universal and Secure Smart Contract-Enabled WiFi Hotspot. In: Park, N., Sun, K., Foresti, S., Butler, K., Saxena, N. (eds) Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. SecureComm 2020. Lecture Notes of the Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering, vol 335. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-63086-7_23
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