On the IEEE 802.11i security: a denial‐of‐service perspective

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11i standard provides authentication and security at the Medium Access Control layer in wireless local area networks (WLANs). It involves an authentication process followed by a four‐way handshake to evolve a key for securing data sessions. The standard suffers under denial‐of‐service (DoS) attacks. These attacks often block the ongoing communication process and deprive services to the legitimate users. These are easy to conduct while maintaining anonymity of the attackers. It hence becomes imperative to learn about the attacks and their solutions in IEEE 802.11i‐protected WLANs so that future research proposals and solutions to mitigate the attack may develop. The paper presents a review of DoS attacks and existing solutions pertaining to the IEEE 802.11i security standard. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Security in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs)

“…Traditionally, the entity authentication and access control is provided by the legacy authentication standard i.e., WEP. It has proved insufficient [2] and is hence, deprecated. Currently, IEEE 802.11i (WPA2) [1] security standard is used as an entity authentication and access control mechanism.…”

“…Once STAs are authenticated, the standard evolves fresh secret keys to secure data communication over 802.11 wireless LANs. A large numbers of packets are used in these processes [2], which results in an increased process length, communication overhead and network overhead. The authentication and 4-way handshake both are prone to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks.…”

“…The authentication and 4-way handshake both are prone to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. This is due to the lack of proper authentication and insecure message communications between wireless devices [2,6].…”

“…For controlling access into the WLANs IEEE 802.11i (WPA2) is the main standard [1]. This standard though provides flexibility in user authentication but has several issues under the Denial of Service (DoS) attacks [2]. For providing protection to individual WLAN data frames encryption mechanisms like WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) and AES-CCMP (Advanced Encryption Standard-Counter mode with CBC-MAC protocol) are used.…”

Utilization of blockchain for mitigating the distributed denial of service attacks

“…The victim may be a single host or entire network. The DDoS attack also exhausts the computing and communication resources of the victim within a short period of time …”