Real Vulnerabilities and Practical Solutions

The convenience of 802.11-based wireless access networks has led to widespread deployment in the consumer, industrial and military sectors. However, this use is predicated on an implicit assumption of confidentiality and availability. While the secu- rity flaws in 802.11's basic confidentially mechanisms have been widely publicized, the threats to network availability are far less widely appreciated. In fact, it has been suggested that 802.11 is highly suscepti- ble to malicious denial-of-service (DoS) attacks tar- geting its management and media access protocols. This paper provides an experimental analysis of such 802.11-specific attacks - their practicality, their ef- ficacy and potential low-overhead implementation changes to mitigate the underlying vulnerabilities.