Watching for Weakness in Wild WPANs

Low-rate Wireless Personal Area Networks (WPANs) are inexpensive to deploy and operate, making them a popular choice for monitoring and controlling infrastructure. Many simulations have been conducted to study WPANs for performance, scalability and security. However, the accuracy of these simulations is wholly dependent upon their underlying assumptions. In this paper we test these assumptions by passively observing and analyzing real-world low-rate WPANs operating in ten U.S. cities and three vendor-programmed demonstration kits. We evaluate the security measures of operational WPANs and statistically study their wireless traffic patterns. Our investigations indicate that popular simulation assumptions about low-rate WPANs do not accurately reflect the nature of the observed networks. We also find evidence of faulty security in an operational WPAN.