Analysis and Improvements over DoS Attacks against IEEE 802.11i Standard

Abstract

IEEE 802.11i standard defines the security specifications of IEEE 802.11 series Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN). However, IEEE 802. Hi standard cannot prevent various Denial of Service (DoS) attacks including de-authentication/ disassociation DoS attacks and memory/CPU DoS attacks. The purpose of this paper is to analyze those vulnerabilities and improve the IEEE 802. Hi standard by proposing their solutions. For de-authentication/disassociation DoS attacks, we propose a hybrid mechanism which can effectively mitigate this attack. For memory/CPU DoS attack against 4-way Handshake protocol, we propose an alternative Enhanced 3-way Handshake protocol which can effectively prevent this attack and can save computation cost compared to the original protocol.