Identifying mobiles hiding behind wireless routers

—The network address translation technique (NAT) is widely used in wireless routers. It is a low cost solution to IPv4 address space limitations. However, cyber criminals may abuse NAT and hide behind wireless routers to use mobile devices and conduct crimes. To identify a suspect mobile device, we should be able to map the suspect public traffic on the Internet to the private traffic behind the wireless router in WLAN. In this paper, we propose a suite of novel packet size based traffic marking techniques to identify suspect mobiles in encrypted wireless networks as well as open wireless networks. To cope with severe packet loss during wireless sniffing, we proposed to use error correcting codes to improve detection rate. We conducted extensive analysis and experiments to demonstrate the efficiency and accuracy of our schemes, which achieve high detection rate and very small false positive rate. The proposed strategies can be used for law enforcement for combatting cyber crimes...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2011
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Yinjie Chen, Zhongli Liu, Benyuan Liu, Xinwen Fu, Wei Zhao
• Keywords: Communications, Crime Scene Investigations, Cyber Crimes, INFOCOM 2011, Network Address Translation