CS&E research papers accepted to MobiCom 2021

March 19, 2021

Headshots of Feng Qian and Ruofeng Liu — Assistant Professor Feng Qian and Ph.D. student Ruofeng Liu

CS&E is proud to announce the acceptance of two papers from our networking researchers for the upcoming 27th Annual International Conference on Mobile Computing and Networking. The MobiCom conference is dedicated to addressing the challenges in the areas of mobile computing and wireless and mobile networking and is the premier international forum for addressing networks, systems, algorithms, and applications that support mobile computers and wireless networks.

WiBeacon: expanding BLE location-based services via wifi

Authors: Ruofeng Liu (Ph.D. student), Zhimeng Yin (Ph.D. 2020), Wenchao Jiang, Tian He (adjunct professor)

Abstract: Despite the popularity of Bluetooth low energy (BLE) location-based services (LBS) in Internet of things applications, large-scale BLE LBS are extremely challenging due to the expenses of deploying and maintaining BLE beacons. To alleviate this issue, this work presents WiBeacon, which repurposes ubiquitously deployed WiFi access points (AP) into virtual BLE beacons via only moderate software upgrades. Specifically, a WiBeacon-enabled AP can broadcast elaborately designed WiFi packets that could be recognized as iBeacon-compatible location identifiers by unmodified mobile BLE devices. This offers fast deployment of BLE LBS with zero additional hardware costs and low maintenance burdens. WiBeacon is carefully integrated with native WiFi services, retaining transparency to WiFi clients. We implement WiBeacon on commodity WiFi APs (with various chipsets such as Qualcomm, Broadcom, and MediaTek) and extensively evaluate it across various scenarios, including a real commercial application for courier check-ins. During the two-week pilot study, WiBeacon provides reliable services, i.e., as robust as conventional BLE beacons, for 697 users with 150 types of smartphones.

A Nationwide Census on WiFi Security Threats: Prevalence, Riskiness, and the Economics

Authors: Di Gao, Hao Lin, Zhenhua Li, Feng Qian (assistant professor), Qi Alfred Chen, Zhiyun Qian, Wei Liu, Liangyi Gong, Yunhao Liu

Abstract: Carrying over 75% of the last-mile mobile Internet traffic, WiFi has inevitably become an enticing target for various security threats. In this work, we characterize a wide variety of real-world WiFi threats at an unprecedented scale, involving 19 million WiFi access points (APs) mostly located in China, by deploying a crowdsourced security checking system on 14 million mobile devices in the wild. Leveraging the collected data, we reveal the landscape of nationwide WiFi threats for the first time. We find that the prevalence, riskiness, and breakdown of WiFi threats deviate significantly from common understandings and prior studies. In particular, we detect attacks at around 4% of all WiFi APs, uncover that most WiFi attacks are driven by an underground economy, and provide strong evidence of web analytics platforms being the bottleneck of its monetization chain. Further, we provide insightful guidance for defending against WiFi attacks at scale, and some of our efforts have already yielded real-world impact—effectively disrupted the WiFi attack ecosystem.

CS&E research papers accepted to MobiCom 2021

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