Australian Information Security Management Conference

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publisher

School of Computer and Information Science, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Western Australia

Comments

8th Australian Information Security Mangement Conference, Edith Cowan University, Perth Western Australia, 30th November 2010

Abstract

With the advance of wireless access technologies, the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) has gained significant increase in popularity and deployment due to the substantially improved transmission rate and decreased deployment costs. However, this same widespread deployment makes WLANs an attractive target for network attacks. Several vulnerabilities have been identified and reported regarding the security of the current 802.11 standards. To address those security weaknesses, IEEE standard committees proposed the 802.11i amendment to enhance WLAN security. The 802.11i standard has demonstrated the capability of providing satisfactory mutual authentication, better data confidentiality, and key management support, however, the design of 802.11i does not consider network availability. Thus 802.11i is highly susceptible to malicious denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, which exploit the vulnerability of unprotected management frames. This paper proposes, tests and evaluates a combination of three novel methods by which the exploitation of 802.11i by DoS attacks can be improved. These three methods include an access point nonce dialogue scheme, a fast access point transition protocol handoff scheme and a location management based selective scanning scheme. This combination is of particular value to real-time users running time-dependant applications such as VoIP. In order to acquire practical data to evaluate the proposed schemes, a prototype network has been implemented as an experimental testbed using open source tools and drivers. This testbed allows practical data to be collected and analysed. The result demonstrates that not only the proposed authentication scheme eradicates most of the DoS vulnerabilities, but also substantially improved the handoff performance to a level suitable for supporting real-time services.

DOI

10.4225/75/57b672c23477f

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