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Projecte llegit

Títol: A Study of Wi-Fi Security Evolution: Attacks, Weaknesses and Countermeasures

Estudiants que han llegit aquest projecte:

Director/a: GARCÍA VILLEGAS, EDUARD

Departament: ENTEL

Títol: A Study of Wi-Fi Security Evolution: Attacks, Weaknesses and Countermeasures

Data inici oferta: 22-01-2026     Data finalització oferta: 22-09-2026


Estudis d'assignació del projecte:
    GR ENG TELEMÀTICA
Tipus: Individual
 
Lloc de realització: EETAC
 
Paraules clau:
Wi-Fi, IEEE 802.11, security, privacy, ethical hacking, hacking, raspberry, flipper, cybersecurity, wep, wpa, wpa2, wpa3
 
Descripció del contingut i pla d'activitats:
Wi-Fi security has evolved significantly over the years, largely driven by the discovery of practical weaknesses in earlier protection mechanisms. Early solutions such as WEP were shown to be fundamentally insecure, which led to the introduction of improved security architectures through successive amendments. Standards such as IEEE 802.11i strengthened authentication and encryption, while later amendments, including IEEE 802.11w and more recent work, addressed management frame protection, privacy, and resilience against emerging attacks.

Despite these advances, new vulnerabilities continue to be discovered, often exploiting protocol design choices, backward compatibility, or implementation issues. As a result, understanding Wi-Fi security requires not only studying the standards themselves, but also analyzing how real attacks are carried out in practice and how effective the proposed countermeasures are.

The goal of this thesis is to provide a comprehensive and practical view of the evolution of Wi-Fi security, combining protocol analysis with hands-on experimentation. The student will first conduct a literature review to understand the state of the art, the historical evolution of security and privacy mechanisms, and the main attacks identified over time. Next, the student will study and evaluate available tools used to perform Wi-Fi attacks. Finally, selected attacks will be reproduced on a real testbed using commercial Wi-Fi equipment, and the full process will be carefully documented and demonstrated.
 
Overview (resum en anglès):
Wi-Fi networks are widely used in everyday connectivity, but their open radio nature exposes them to security risks that have required continuous protocol evolution. This Bachelor's Thesis studies the evolution of Wi-Fi security mechanisms from WEP to WPA3, combining theoretical analysis with practical experiments in a controlled laboratory environment.
The work reviews the main weaknesses and improvements introduced by WEP, WPA, WPA2 and WPA3, with particular attention to authentication, encryption, management-frame protection and client behaviour. The practical part uses a Raspberry Pi 5 with Kali Linux and external wireless adapters to carry out Wi-Fi auditing tests, including network scanning, probe request analysis, WPA/WPA2 handshake capture, Evil Twin deployment and WPA3 validation. A secondary platform based on Flipper Zero is also used for tactical wireless demonstrations.
The experimental results are analysed through packet captures, command outputs and observed client behaviour during each test. This evidence is used to compare different practical scenarios, including probe request exposure, WPA/WPA2 handshake capture, offline password testing, Evil Twin deployment, tactical wireless demonstrations and WPA3 defensive validation.
Overall, the results show that Wi-Fi security depends not only on the protocol itself, but also on configuration, client behaviour, hardware compatibility and tool reliability. The thesis highlights the practical improvements introduced by WPA3 while also showing the importance of controlled testing and careful interpretation of wireless security results.

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