SecureScan: Private and Secure WiFi Service Discovery

Research has shown that devices using the current WiFi standard are easily vulnerable to attacks which allow an adversary to compromise a user's privacy and security. A number of these vulnerabilities arise from the insecure design of the WiFi scanning protocol. This paper contributes a new wireless service discovery protocol, SecureScan, which improves both the privacy and security of the current WiFi implementation's scanning procedure. The safety and liveness properties of SecureScan are shown to hold formally under a Dolev-Yao adversary where the current WiFi implementation fails. Experimental results demonstrate that SecureScan provides strong privacy to mobile devices, approximately equivalent to being selected at random, at the cost of increasing message size and requiring more computational resources.