Current status of the wireless local area networks in
Romania
Valeriu IONESCU, Florin SMARANDA
Faculty of Electronics, Communications and Computer Science,
University of Piteşti,
Piteşti, Romania
valeriu.ionescu@upit.ro
Adrian-Viorel DIACONU
ETTI Department,
Politehnica University of Bucharest,
Bucharest, Romania
Abstract—This paper presents a study concerning the current
implementation of 802.11 wireless local area networks in
Romania and their security. The data that was gathered
throughout the year 2012 presents the structure of the wireless
networks in rural areas compared to urban areas, identifies
potential security problems and situates the Romanian national
development in the global context. This paper is part of a study
concerning the security of computer networks related to the new
threats to this segment of mobile networking.
Keywords—wireless; wardrive; security protocols; Romania
I. INTRODUCTION
The mobility is the key factor in the evolution of many
domains ranging from distance learning to economic
transactions.
The development of various fast and affordable mobile
devices (smart phones, tablets, laptops, etc.) led to an increase
in wireless network traffic. Many business can quickly set up a
wireless local area network in order to connect end devices
with all the advantages that come from the lack of wires.
The Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) development
in Romania is strongly related to the local economic
conditions. Many businesses see the advantages of having
internet connectivity but usually use a wired connection and
local distribution, as setting up a wireless network involves a
higher cost. This paper will use the term WLAN to identify
802.11 a, b, g and n network types.
Security is a keyword usually associated with wireless
networks. Wireless security is usually a problem because the
attacker has direct access to the transmission medium and can
easily identify the security methods used by the legitimate user.
This was further complicated because the end devices for
mobile traffic do not have high computational power therefore
Ion SIMA
IT&C Department,
LUMINA – The University of South-East Europe,
Bucharest, Romania
the authentication and encryption algorithms needed to have a
reduced hardware footprint, reduced power consumption and
reduced impact on the data rates [1].
Most non professional users also do not have access to
enterprise level authentication key distribution methods (such
as a RADIUS authentication server) which further decrease the
security options, and at the same time it was necessary to
develop authentication methods for users that were easy to use
and did not require very long passwords.
Recent studies have shown that beyond simple social
engineering attacks and brute force attacks (mostly dictionary
based attacks) multiple vulnerabilities have been found for
wireless networks (such as WEP vulnerability, WPA short
packet spoofing and the exploit of Wi-Fi Protected Setup -WPS
data PIN acknowledgement messages) that are hard to remedy
for a non specialized user.
Usually small businesses rarely can finance the cost of a
dedicated network administrator and the wireless network is
configured and secured only at the installation time. The
contracts for further network maintenance are for the situation
where the quality of service is affected, however the networks
security can be affected well before that.
This paper makes a survey of the WLAN environment in
Romania concerning the 802.11a,b,g,n wireless coverage with
the following main aspects: wireless types; wireless security;
wireless network structure and rural to city comparison.
Extensive research regarding the current wireless
implementations was performed in 2012 with the help of the
students of the Faculty of Electronics, Communications and
Computers from the University of Pitesti is the basis for this
paper. The use of multiple devices resulted in hardware and
software incompatibilities that led to a thorough process of
software selection in order to obtain uniform results.
 II. THE TOOLS FOR STATISTICS COLLECTION
Conducting a study of this magnitude needed tools and
planning that would ensure a relevant sampling of all regions
of the country. The scanning process for wireless access points
was performed using wardriving, a technique where the
scanning is made onboard a moving vehicle. This method is
widely used and its purpose varies from simple detection of
free wireless access points in order to create a map of free
internet access, to attempts to security breach.
On the internet exists a large collection of wardrives called
WiGLE.net constructed with data from various types of
wardriving software, collection that can be freely interrogated
in order to analyze the data. While this collection can easily
give an estimate on the number, security and type of wireless
networks in a certain region, the number of collected features
is reduced or compacted to generic values (for example the
security is simply stored in NetStumbler [2] files, that count as
10% of the WiGLE.net database, only as unencrypted or
encrypted (without further differentiation between WPA and
WPA2).
The dynamic of the wireless connectivity has increased
rapidly in the last couple of years (this can also be seen in the
WiGLE.net database as a increase in the number of daily
reported wardrives in 2012 compared to previous years - Fig.
1) and an investigation regarding the status of the wireless
connectivity in Romania needed data collected in collected
conditions, in addition to the information from the WiGLE.net
database, in order to give a correct representation.
Many software tools that can be used for wardriving, each
with different characteristics targeting different operating
systems (Linux, Windows, Android). Because the wardrivers
were performed with a multitude of mobile devices (the
students of the Faculty of Electronics, Communications and
Computers), some having hardware compatibility problems,
the following features were searched:
-compatibility and reliability: there are professional tools
that run on dedicated hardware and there is software that has
compatibility and limitations of the features depending on the
hardware and operating system. We searched free tools that
run on non dedicated hardware;
Fig. 1. WiGLE.net daily added WiFi Networks (year average) [3]
-complete data logging: some tools detect wireless
characteristics but lack data logging, offer incomplete data
logging (NetStumbler ns1 file format explained in the
previous chapter), or offer the saving by email feature (which
can be problematic if the device is running out of power in an
area with no internet access);
-localization: GPS data reading is necessary in order to
process the results according to the geographic position;
-detection of the Wi-Fi Protected Setup feature: even if this
feature is strongly promoted by many hardware vendors, early
implementations present serious security problems [4] [5].
Currently only few software solutions able to detect WPS;
-detection of wireless network type: some software
solutions do not log this feature (WiGLE for Android) that is
important for the stated target of this research. Also, most
wireless chipsets are designed for 2.4GHz operation leaving
only a few chipsets with dual band operation (that includes
5Ghz frequency used by the 802.11a specification).
While Linux as operating system and Kismet as a wardrive
software is the preferred combination, the hardware
incompatibilities due to the heterogeneous hardware base, led
to the decision that for this analysis the method used for
wireless network discovery was the use of the "netsh wlan
show networks mode=bssid" command in Microsoft Windows
that allows gathering information about the Network type,
Authentication, Encryption, BSSID and Radio type. The
software that uses this command is Vistumbler and it also
supports reading GPS data. As this software does not detect
the WPS feature, the Wigle Wifi software was used in parallel,
running on the Android OS (with Wigle Wifi being unable to
detect the network type). Both software allow the export to
KML format that is used to visualize areas in Google Maps or
Google Earth.
III. WARDRIVE DATA
As the basis for the results of this paper were analyzed
more than 18000 Access Points (AP) in Bucharest, and nearly
20000 wireless networks in the rest of the country. Fig. 2
shows the main areas that were scanned in 2012.
Fig. 2. Main areas that were scanned for this study
 Most major cities in Romania were scanned such as:
Bucharest, Cluj, Timisoara, Craiova, Constanta, Ploiesti, Iasi,
Pitesti, Buzau, but also many smaller rural locations where the
scanned because the results in these areas usually differ from
results scanned in cities as seen in previous studies [6].
The results from the capital city Bucharest often differ
significantly from the results of other Romanian cities,
therefore they were analyzed in most situations separately.

IV. WARDRIVE RESULTS (a) (b)

Fig. 3. Distribution of 802.11 protocols in Romania for cities (a) and rural
The first objective was to determine what is the share of areas (b)
various Wi-Fi protocols used in Romania, as there are many
versions available for the market: 802.11a, 802.11b, 802.11b
and 802.11n.
The results in Fig. 3 show that 802.11n technology is well
adopted in Romania in both rural and urban environment (54%
in rural, 59% in urban areas). 802.11b technology is nearing
the end of its life with under 1%. The urban graphic is also
representative for the Bucharest wardrives.
A technology that was available for a long time was
802.11a (ratified in 1999) that uses the band at 5GHz (5.47 to (a) (b)
5.725 GHz), having the advantage of no interfering with
2.4GHz networks. Fig. 4. The share of provider installations compared to private installations in
rural areas (a) and urban areas (b)
The scanning results in Romanian showed that the number
of 5GHz wireless networks was extremely low, having found Changing the MAC address for these devices is also
only two 5GHz wireless Access Points (APs). possible but this only involves a small percentage of the total
users and should not affect the results of the study.
At global level the number of 5GHz networks is reduced
due to higher hardware costs and reduced percent of hardware The results show that the share of provider based
supporting this standard. The data is confirmed by the installations is larger in rural environment (33%) compared to
WiGLE.NET database statistics [3], where the channels used the urban areas (17%), where people tend to deploy the
by 802.11a technology count as under 1% of the overall wireless networks with their own hardware.
wireless networks.
Another aspect that was studied was the use of security
While 802.11a was not a successful technology, this protocols. Rural areas have more unsecured APs (22%) than
situation is possible to change soon as the need for more cities (14%) or compared to the capital Bucharest (8%).
throughput will bring new products to the market operating in
the 5Ghz band such as IEEE 802.11ac and 802.11ad.
Internet providers (such as Romtelecom, Vodafone,
Orange, RDS, etc.) have offered for years local wireless
connectivity solutions as an extension to the wired
connectivity in order to attract more users both at personal and
enterprise level.
These solutions often include public hot spots and wired
connections to the users home accompanied by the leasing of (a) (b)
an wireless router to the user (ADSL modems with Wi-Fi).
This is a potential incentive for users to implement WLANs
using the provider hardware.
Finding this type of APs is possible because, even if the
Service set identification (SSID) can be easily customized by
the user, many users leave the default SSID on and (for those
users that customize the SSID) the device's MAC addresses
have similar OUI (usually because a large number of similar (c)
devices is acquired by the provider from a single hardware
Fig. 5. Security protocols distribution in rural areas (a), urban areas (b) and
manufacturer for implementing the WLANs in a determined Bucharest (c)
geographical region).

(a) (b)
(c)
Fig. 6. Detail of security protocols in rural areas (a), urban areas (b) and
Bucharest (c)
Fig. 7. Worldwide WiGLE.net security protocols in September 2012[3]
Netstumbler files (ns1) [2] only save the security protocol
information as generic WEP (for WEP,WPA and WPA2) and
these results can be interrogated from the WiGLE.net. These
results are not sufficient for this analysis as WEP security
protocol is easily penetrated [7], and should be regarded as a
security problem. Our wardrive results show that rural areas
present a large number of Open System Authentication APs
(46%) as unencrypted (22%) or WEP (24%).
The number of APs that use WPA and WPA2 is very large.
In order to obtain a perspective on the context of WiFi
installations in Romania relative to the global status of WiFi
networks, we used the WiGLE.net database for comparison,
because it has a large number of wardrive results from multiple
countries.
The worldwide evolution of used security protocols (as
analyzed from the WiGLE.net database) shows that indeed
WPA2 security protocol is rapidly increasing in the detriment
of the less secure WPA and the insecure WEP. The large
number of unencrypted APs is partially due to many free
access points offered by shops to their clients or by internet
providers in order to promote their connections. Most of these
free wireless connections have limitations on the speed or on
the total navigation time.
The situation in Romania (especially in urban areas)
compared to worldwide results shows a larger number of
WPA2 connections in the detriment of the WEP security
protocol. One possible cause, as identified in this paper, is the
large percentage of new 802.11n hardware that has WPA or
WPA2 capability. WEP encryption is usually used today for
hardware compatibility purpose (hardware that does not
support WPA or WPA2) and these results show that there is a
smaller percentage of legacy hardware in Romania.
V. CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents the methodology and the results of a
study on the status of the local wireless networks in Romania
in the year 2012. This study was performed with a
heterogeneous hardware base (various PCs and Android
Smartphones) with the help of the students of the Faculty of
Electronics, Communications and Computers from the
University of Pitesti. Because of this, decisions had to be made
on the software used in order to ensure capturing similar results
from all participants.
This paper results showed that in Romania the adoption of
new technologies follows the international tendencies, having
the advantage that there is a reduced base of legacy equipment,
especially in rural areas. The market is still not saturated with
wireless networks because:
- the advent of High Definition content on the internet will
drive the need for more 802.11n networks or even faster
networks in the detriment of 802.11g and 802.11b networks
that still represent an important share of the implementations;
- the second reason is that rural locations have still to be
fully covered by wired and wireless connectivity, as in most
cases the internet connectivity uses costly 3G.
The study also concluded that the network security in urban
environment is higher than in rural environment through the
higher use of WPA/WPA2 security protocols.
The study will continue with the purpose to create an online
database with updated information targeting specifically local
wireless networks in Romania that should server for further
comparative investigations.
REFERENCES
[1] Valeriu IONESCU, Florin Smaranda, Emil Sofron, „Performance
Impact Of Wireless Security in 802.11 Networks”, THE 4th
INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE RoEduNet ROMANIA, MAY 20 -
22, 2005, ISBN 973-7794-26-5
[2] Marius Milner, "How to read and write .NS1 files", April 22,
2004,http://www.stumbler.net/ns1files.html, Accessed September 2012.
[3] Wireless Geographic Logging Engine, Statistics, http://wigle.net/graph-
large.html, Accessed September 2012
[4] Stefan Viehböck "Brute forcing Wi-Fi Protected Setup. When poor
design meets poor implementation", 26.12.2011, Version 3,
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