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Let numbers tell the tale: measuring security trends in wi-fi networks and best practices

Motivated by the recent push towards adopting new standards and the discovery of numerous vulnerabilities in both new and old protocols, this paper analyzes the security of Wi-Fi networks. Our analysis is based on publicly available datasets and our own survey covering 250,137 networks across four countries in three continents. We present several key insights, including the continued use of outdated security configurations and vulnerable protocols, the adoption rates of modern protocols, the increasing presence of mesh networks as part of smart city infrastructure, and the vast differences depending on the surveyed geographic region and frequency spectrum. Additionally, we identify and improve upon shortcomings in previous surveys, and recommend best practices for future surveying. In summary, our work provides a more fine-grained understanding on Wi-Fi network security in the real-world. Finally, we publish our tools used for extracting security statistics, and make all anonymized datasets available to other researchers.