Wireless Network Security Risk Assessment Method Based On 4-layer Risk Analytic Hierarchy

As a new technology, more and more users prefer wireless LAN for its flexibility and convenience, and it’s developing at an unprecedented speed. At the same time, there are more safety issues in wireless network due to its characteristics of wireless signal propagation, and there are more attack methods in the wireless LAN. All this will bring administators greater challenger when protecting the wireless work from all kinds of attacks. It is necessary to design a security risk assessment method for wireless network, and help the administrator to manage the network. The method should give reasonable network risk assessment values based on the actual characteristics of a given network, and this value will help administrator make decisions in managing the wireless network.This paper presents a wireless network security risk assessment method based on Analytic Hierarchy Process. And this method can help administrators manage the security of wireless network. The assessment method consists of risk model and risk assessment measure. Firstly, we use risk model modeling the wireless network. In this risk model, system configuration, wireless attacks and security requirements are considered. Then, use the evaluation method to determine the risk assessment value of the given wireless network. Based on the risk assessment model for each device, the method will assess wireless network risk considering device, attack and system configeration. So the risk assessment method can make assessment in considering the dependency in wireless network.Finally, this paper introduces two experiments to verify the feasibility of the method. In the first experiment, the results show our risk assessment value can reflect the difference of the two wireless networks with defferent security status. The second experiment show that our method can efficiently evaluate the dynamic wireless work, and the assess result meets the theoretical result.