INSURE: Intrusion detectioN System for pUblic hotspot cybeR sEcurity

Wi-Fi attracts great interest among Internet Service Providers and end users despite the growth in popularity of the 4G/5G technologies. Mobile operators want to see a closer integration between mobile broadband networks and Wi-Fi access points, also known as Hotspots, as these represent a key solution to improve the overall performance of the mobile communication. Unfortunately, public Wi-Fi hotspots pose many security risks to millions of laptop, tablet and smartphone owners, exposing banking credentials, account passwords and personal information to an increasing number of sophisticated, easy to launch and untraceable cyber-attacks. Hence, providing strong and reliable security mechanisms has become critically important. This proposal presents INSURE, an unsupervised anomaly-based Intrusion Detection System that will provide an extra level of assurance to end user devices in public Wi-Fi hotspot networks, by identifying different types of threats in real-time. INSURE advances the state-of-the-art as it exploits a novel detection methodology, which automatically adapts to the current characteristics of the network traffic without manual intervention from an administrator. It automatically constructs a reference from normal behaviour and flags as malicious information that deviates from this reference. The proposal aims to develop INSURE into a fully operational commercial Intrusion Detection System.