On the Way to IEEE 802.11 DoS Resilience

Abstract. In this work we provide an overview of the present IEEE 802.11 security and analyse the roots of unsolved vulnerabilities based on the manipulation of the Medium Access Control (MAC) address and on the fact that management and control frames are not authenticated. These vulnerabilities are the basis for most prominent Denial-of-Service attacks on the IEEE 802.11 link layer. We discuss possible solutions and describe our concept of protection called the Early MAC Address Bind-ing, which is a light-weight cryptographic protocol based on the Die-Hellman key exchange. Our protection mechanism does not require any changes in the current IEEE 802.11 state machine, nor any additional message exchange. As a result, both stations and access points are pro-tected from the moment when both parties allocate resources for further communication. Keywords: WLANs, Security, Denial-of-Service