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Web-based authentication is a popular mechanism implemented by Wireless Internet Service Providers (WISPs) because it allows a simple registration and authentication of customers, while avoiding the high resource requirements of the new IEEE 802.11i security standard and the backward compatibility issues of legacy devices. In this work we demonstrate two different and novel attacks against web-based authentication. One attack exploits operational anomalies of low- and middle-priced devices in order to hijack wireless clients, while the other exploits an already known vulnerability within wired-networks, which in dynamic wireless environments turns out to be even harder to detect and protect against.
Wireless LANs operating within unlicensed frequency bands require random access schemes such as CSMA/ CA, so that wireless networks from different administrative domains (for example wireless community networks) may co-exist without central coordination, even when they happen to operate on the same radio channel. Yet, it is evident that this Jack of coordination leads to an inevitable loss in efficiency due to contention on the MAC layer. The interesting question is, which efficiency may be gained by adding coordination to existing, unrelated wireless networks, for example by self-organization. In this paper, we present a methodology based on a mathematical programming formulation to determine the
parameters (assignment of stations to access points, signal strengths and channel assignment of both access points and stations) for a scenario of co-existing CSMA/ CA-based wireless networks, such that the contention between these networks is minimized. We demonstrate how it is possible to solve this discrete, non-linear optimization problem exactly for small
problems. For larger scenarios, we present a genetic algorithm specifically tuned for finding near-optimal solutions, and compare its results to theoretical lower bounds. Overall, we provide a benchmark on the minimum contention problem for coordination mechanisms in CSMA/CA-based wireless networks.