Prevention of management frame attacks on 802.11 WLANs Online publication date: Sun, 11-Oct-2009
by Wenfeng Ge, Jing Li, Srinivas Sampalli
International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing (IJWMC), Vol. 3, No. 3, 2009
Abstract: Since the ratification of the IEEE 802.11 standard, 802.11 Wireless LANs (WLANs) have been widely deployed in research, government, military and industrial environments. However, 802.11 WLANs suffer from a number of security problems. In particular, management frames in 802.11 WLANs are not protected. A number of attacks such as denial of service, impersonation and man-in-the-middle can be launched by exploiting unprotected management frames. Even the newly ratified 802.11i security standard does not protect the network against such attacks. We present a per-frame authentication scheme to protect 802.11 management frames. With this scheme, every frame received by the wireless client or access point is first authenticated and then the corresponding management function carried out. Our scheme is compatible with the original 802.11 standard and uses the most of the 802.11 standard resources. We have implemented a prototype of our scheme and built a test bed to launch management frame attacks and to demonstrate how our scheme can prevent such attacks.
Existing subscribers:
Go to Inderscience Online Journals to access the Full Text of this article.
If you are not a subscriber and you just want to read the full contents of this article, buy online access here.Complimentary Subscribers, Editors or Members of the Editorial Board of the International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing (IJWMC):
Login with your Inderscience username and password:
Want to subscribe?
A subscription gives you complete access to all articles in the current issue, as well as to all articles in the previous three years (where applicable). See our Orders page to subscribe.
If you still need assistance, please email subs@inderscience.com
Our Blog 
Follow us on Twitter 
Visit us on Facebook