PhyFinAtt: An Undetectable Attack Framework Against PHY Layer Fingerprint-Based WiFi Authentication

WiFi connection has been suffering from MAC forgery attacks due to the loose authentication mechanism between access points (APs) and clients. To address this problem, the physical (PHY) layer information-based fingerprint has been adopted for safe WiFi authentication. Since such a fingerprint is constant and unique for each specific network interface card (NIC), it can effectively prevent MAC forgery attacks. However, the PHY layer information-based fingerprint is still vulnerable to malicious attacks as it is extracted from Channel State Information (CSI), and its stability can be affected by the wireless environment. In this paper, we propose a novel undetectable attack framework, called PhyFinAtt, base on which the attacker can undermine the stability of the PHY layer-based authentication fingerprints through human movement and further attack the WiFi authentication protocols. Specifically, we first demonstrate that human movement at a designated location can affect the PHY fingerprint. We then illustrate the impact of human movement on the PHY fingerprint and the relationship between the movement and the channel quality to ensure that the PHY fingerprint is destroyed by the movement in an undetected way without affecting normal communication. Extensive experiments in real-world scenarios show that our proposed attack can effectively disrupt the stability of the PHY fingerprints and significantly degrade the performance of the authentication protocols based on such fingerprints. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on effective attacks against the PHY information-based WiFi authentication protocols. Furthermore, we also present a practical defense mechanism without involving any additional equipment to mitigate attacks similar to PhyFinAtt.