Cost-effective quality assurance of wireless network security

Abstract

Wireless communication is a common part of modern society, incorporated into new products and services bringing additional security risks and requirements. To meet these needs and assure quality assurance, thorough wireless security testing needs to be completed before new products or services are released. Meticulous testing is expensive, consuming resources and time. This paper presents a general method for network security analysis and experimentation that reduces time and costs. Factorial experiment design tests multiple factors in parallel, while producing robust, repeatable and statistically significant results by treating all other parameters as noise when testing first order effects. Also, second and third order effects can be analyzed with less significance. This paper presents this approach used in the experimental design and statistical analysis of a WiMAX denial of service (DoS) attack targeting bandwidth contention resolution system parameters of IEEE 802.16e. We outline how this approach can be used as a cost-effective method for network security analysis.