This paper presents a fully functional and highly portable mini Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system, HAWK, for conducting aerial localization. HAWK is a programmable mini helicopter Draganflyer X6 armed with a wireless sniffer Nokia N900. We developed custom PI-Control laws to implement a robust waypoint algorithm for the mini helicopter to fly a planned route. A Moore space filling curve is designed as a flight route for HAWK to survey a specific area. A set of theorems were derived to calculate the minimum Moore curve level for sensing all targets in the area with minimum flight distance. With such a flight strategy, we can confine the location of a target of interest to a small hot area. We can recursively apply the Moore curve-based flight route to the hot area for a fine-grained localization of a target of interest. We have conducted extensive experiments to validate the feasibility of HAWK and our theory. A demo of HAWK in autonomous fly is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju86xnHbEq0.

In many wireless localization applications, we rotate a directional antenna to derive the angle of arrival (AOA) of wireless signals transmitted from a target mobile device. The AOA corresponds to the direction in which the maximum received signal strength (RSS) is sensed. However, an unanswered question is how to make sure the directional antenna picks up packets producing the maximum RSS while rotating. We propose a set of novel RSS sampling theory to answer this question. We recognize the process that a directional antenna measures RSS of wireless packets while rotating as the process that the radiation pattern of the directional antenna is sampled. Therefore, if RSS samples can reconstruct the antenna's radiation pattern, the direction corresponding to the peak of the radiation pattern is the AOA of the target. We derive mathematical models to determine the RSS sampling rate given the target's packet transmission rate. Our RSS sampling theory is applicable to various types of directional antennas. To validate our RSS sampling theory, we developed BotLoc, which is a programmable and self-coordinated robot armed with a wireless sniffer. We conducted extensive real-world experiments and the experimental results match the theory very well. A video of BotLoc is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=WtUt0IqhXRU&feature=youtu.be.

This paper presents a fully functional and highly portable mini Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system, HAWK, for conducting aerial localization. HAWK is a programmable mini helicopter - Draganflyer X6 - armed with a wireless sniffer - Nokia N900. We developed custom PI-Control laws to implement a robust waypoint algorithm for the mini helicopter to fly a planned route. A Moore space filling curve is designed as a flight route for HAWK to survey a specific area. A set of theorems were derived to calculate the minimum Moore curve level for sensing all targets in the area with minimum flight distance. With such a flight strategy, we can confine the location of a target of interest to a small hot area. We can recursively apply the Moore curve based flight route to the hot area for a fine-grained localization of a target of interest. Therefore, HAWK does not rely on a positioning infrastructure for localization. We have conducted extensive experiments to validate the feasibility of HAWK and our theory. A demo of HAWK in autonomous fly is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju86xnHbEq0.

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 in wireless network crime scene investigations.

Positioning wireless mobiles has been widely studied. However, issues on efficiency and accuracy are not fully considered in the design of most positioning techniques. In this paper, we analyze the performance of localization of wireless mobiles with the knowledge of signal sampling theory. We propose a general approach of locating a wireless mobile device using a directional antenna, and we prove that the correctness of localization depends on the setting of the signal sampling rate. We derived a set of theorems to judge the time cost of localization in order to achieve a certain degree of accuracy. These theorems cover different types of directional antennas for signal strength sampling so that we can utilize them to enhance the positioning accuracy. We conduct extensive simulations to demonstrate the effectiveness and accuracy of our theory.

People are benefiting tremendously from pervasively deployed WiFi networks. However, criminals may exploit the anonymity of WiFi communication and wireless routers to access illegal content such as child porn videos. It's becoming an urgent topic as regards to how to preserve and acquire network forensic data from household and small business wireless routers in order to track down criminals. In this paper, we first survey the forensic capacity of nearly all household wireless routers which are available on market. We present our analysis for people who are willing to choose a wireless router to monitor their network. Secondly, we develop a generic network forensic data logging mechanism to monitor traffic into and out of wireless routers which support OpenWrt. Our code running in the wireless routers could log network traffic and send connection information to the administrator via email.