Using randomized association ID to detect and prevent spoofed PS-Poll based denial of service attacks in IEEE 802.11 WLANs

  • Authors:

  • Zaffar I. Qureshi;Baber Aslam;Athar Mohsin;Yonus Javed

  • Affiliations:

  • Information Security Department, College of Signals, National University of Science & Technology, Rawalpindi, Pakistan;Information Security Department, College of Signals, National University of Science & Technology, Rawalpindi, Pakistan;Computer Science Department, College of Signals, National University of Science & Technology, Rawalpindi, Pakistan;Computer Engineering Department, College of E&M Engineering, National University of Science & Technology, Rawalpindi, Pakistan

  • Venue:
  • WSEAS TRANSACTIONS on COMMUNICATIONS
  • Year:
  • 2008

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) provide connectivity along with flexibility at low cost. Appreciating the exponential growth in this area, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ratified IEEE standard 802.11 in 1999 which was widely accepted as the defacto industry standard for interconnection of portable devices. Due to the scarcity of battery power in portable devices operating in WLANs, IEEE 802.11 directly addressed the issue of Power Saving (PS) and defined a whole mechanism to allow stations (STA) to go into sleep mode without losing information, as Access Point (AP) keeps buffering the messages directed to the sleeping STA. Growing use of IEEE 802.11 lead to the identification of flaws in security specifications of the standard known as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP). These flaws were addressed by the introduction of amendments/enhancements. However, IEEE's security enhancements failed to achieve desired objectives especially availability, which is the main concern of any network administrator. Identity theft due to unauthenticated management and control frames left a window open for hackers to launch successful Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. The PS functions of 802.11 present several identity based vulnerabilities, exploiting which, an attacker can spoof a polling message on behalf of STA and cause AP to discard buffered packets of the client while it is asleep. As a result, an attacker can block victim STA from receiving frames from AP, thus launching a successful DoS attack. The mechanism proposed in [1] addresses the issue of spoofed PS-Poll based DoS attack and proposes a robust solution to this problem. Although the proposed solution was a novel idea; however it was only a mathematical analysis, not verified or tested by implementation on hardware or through simulation. In this extended version of the paper, an endeavor has been made to implement the theoretical idea and validate the mathematical calculations through simulation.