No more free riders: sharing wifi secrets with acoustic signals

Affiliation of Author(s):计算机科学与技术学院/人工智能学院/软件学院

Journal:Proc Int Conf Comput Commun Networks ICCCN

Abstract:Shopping malls, restaurants, and book shops usually offer free WiFi to customers, but they cannot afford non-customers (i.e., WiFi free riders) consuming their limited bandwidth. To provide WiFi information (i.e., SSID and password) secretly to customers, they usually display it in places where only customers can see, and update it regularly. The drawbacks are that customers need to enter the password manually and sometimes they do not know the location of the information. In this paper, we propose an alternative solution. In our system, the WiFi providers set up a speaker to continuously broadcast acoustic signals encoding WiFi information, and the customers use their smartphones to receive and decode the signals. Because acoustic signals attenuate rapidly through walls, only customers in the venue can acquire WiFi information. We implement a prototype system and show the feasibility of our approach. Experiments indicate that in our system, a user can connect successfully to the WiFi within several seconds. © 2019 IEEE.

ISSN No.:1095-2055

Translation or Not:no

Date of Publication:2019-07-01

Co-author:张黎,Wu, Xiaobing

Correspondence Author:Xiaojun Zhu

Date of Publication:2019-07-01