WiFi hotspots have been widely used for establishing public WiFi services and enterprise networks. However, WiFi hotspots often suffer from mediocre security, unreliable performance, limited access, and cumbersome authentication procedure. Specifically, public WiFi hotspots can rarely guarantee satisfactory speed and uptime, and their configuration often requires a complicated setup with subscription to a payment aggregator. Moreover, paid hotspots can neither protect clients against low quality or non-service after prepayment, nor do they provide an adequate defense against misuse by the clients. In this paper, we propose SmartWiFi, a universal, secure, and decentralized smart contract-enabled WiFi hotspot that can be deployed in any public or private environment. SmartWiFi provides cross-domain authentication, fully automated accounting and payments, and security assurance for both hotspots and clients without relying on complex authentication and billing infrastructure. SmartWiFi utilizes a novel off-chain transaction scheme called Hash Chain-based Network Connectivity Satisfaction Acknowledgement (Hansa), which enables fast and low-cost provider-client protocol by restricting otherwise unacceptable delays and fees associated with blockchain interaction. In addition, we present DupSet, a dynamic user-perceived speed estimation technique, which can reliably evaluate the quality of Internet connection from the users’ perspective. We design and implement SmartWiFi desktop and mobile apps using an Ethereum smart contract. With extensive experimental evaluation, we demonstrate that SmartWiFi exhibits rapid execution with low communication overhead and reduced blockchain fees that are adjustable for balancing delays and costs.
[1]
Vitalik Buterin.
A NEXT GENERATION SMART CONTRACT & DECENTRALIZED APPLICATION PLATFORM
,
2015
.
[2]
Xue Liu,et al.
A highly scalable bandwidth estimation of commercial hotspot access points
,
2011,
2011 Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM.
[3]
C. Signer.
Gas Cost Analysis for Ethereum Smart Contracts
,
2018
.
[4]
Ines Gloeckner.
Networked Life 20 Questions And Answers
,
2016
.
[5]
Stefan Tai,et al.
On or Off the Blockchain? Insights on Off-Chaining Computation and Data
,
2017,
ESOCC.
[6]
Abbas Jamalipour,et al.
Wireless communications
,
2005,
GLOBECOM '05. IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, 2005..
[7]
Jeremy Clark,et al.
SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies
,
2015,
2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.
[8]
Zhijin Qin,et al.
OPPay: Design and Implementation of a Payment System for Opportunistic Data Services
,
2017,
2017 IEEE 37th International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems (ICDCS).
[9]
kc claffy,et al.
Bandwidth estimation: metrics, measurement techniques, and tools
,
2003,
IEEE Netw..
[10]
Xiapu Luo,et al.
QDASH: a QoE-aware DASH system
,
2012,
MMSys '12.
[11]
Petar Tsankov,et al.
Securify: Practical Security Analysis of Smart Contracts
,
2018,
CCS.