A Solution to WLAN Authentication and Association DoS Attacks

The growing popularity of the 802.11-based Wireless LAN (WLAN) also increases its risk of security attacks. The new WLAN security standard, 802.11i, addresses most issues on user authentication and data encryption; however, it does not protect WLANs against Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. This paper presents a solution to detect and resolve Authentication Request Flooding (AuthRF) and Association Request Flooding (AssRF). The authors developed an experimental framework to demonstrate and quantify AuthRF and AssRF attacks against TCP and Wireless Voice over IP (WVoIP) communications. Their study shows that such attacks can be easily launched, and cause service disruption.