- Security and Privacy Enhancements for IEEE 802.11
E-Privacy
During the fellowship, I have been in contact with LANCOM, a European company providing Wi-Fi equipment, on improving the security of their devices, inspired by our research and contributions to the IEEE 802.11 standards. This allows European SMEs to take a leadership position on ensuring security and privacy in IEEE 802.11 equipment and networks.
Privacy and security are core human rights in our eyes, and our standardization improvements support this societal right. More broadly, these contributions help us as a European player to influence the IEEE 802.11 standard with these values. The security improvements are also created with sustainability in mind, as their overhead is designed to be minimal and practically negligible, and is designed to be backward compatible to reduce e-waste.
Value of Research
This fellowship supported my work in updating to the IEEE 802.11 standard to prevent a recently discovered security weakness. This weakness is related to mesh networks, where, without extra defenses, an adversary could inject arbitrary packets into protected mesh networks. We designed a defense to mitigate this challenging gap. Unique about our created defense is that it is fully backward compatible, meaning each individual mesh client can independently enable this defense.
