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Denial of Service Attack in Wireless LAN

Authors:
Tauseef Jamal
Pedro Amaral
Asifullah Khan
Aneela Zameer
Kiramat Ullah
Shariq Aziz Butt

Keywords: Virtual Carrier Sense; Medium Access Control; CTS Attack; DoS Attack.

Abstract:
IEEE 802.11 specifications set the standard for Physical and Medium Access Control (MAC) layer for implementing wireless Local Area Network (LAN). In the wireless network, nodes share media elements with each other. Nodes in wireless network access the media through physical layer using Clear Channel Assessment (CCA) plus Virtual Carrier Sense (VCS) at MAC layer. If VCS timer is not properly handled, there is the possibility of Denial of Service (DoS) attack. In this article, we discuss two scenarios. In the first scenario, DoS attack is launched by increasing the time duration of Clear To Send (CTS) frame. When the CTS frame is received by other nodes, they update their Network Allocation Vector (NAV) for extra time. In prevention step, nodes first detect the malicious duration in the CTS frame and then correct the NAV timer to mitigate the attack. This technique is known as RCD (Re-Evaluation of CTS Duration). In the second scenario, DoS attack is launched by flooding the CTS frame periodically. All other overhearing nodes update their NAV and remain in wait state. To handle such kind of attack, nodes never directly update their NAV after receiving CTS, but after checking the Transmitter Address (TA) and Receiver Address (RA). To increase back the performance of network, blacklisting of malicious node technique is used in both scenarios when a DoS attack is detected.

Pages: 42 to 47

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2018

Publication date: March 25, 2018

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-3956

ISBN: 978-1-61208-615-6

Location: Rome, Italy

Dates: from March 25, 2018 to March 29, 2018