Authentication Flooding DOS Attack Detection and Prevention in 802.11

Abstract

Denial of Service (DOS) related attacks remain one of the most established attacks in the wireless local area network (WLAN). While several algorithms have been proposed to detect and prevent DOS attacks in WLANs, most of these methods come with weaknesses that provide attackers with avenues to launch attacks. For instance, the three security protocols set out by the 802.11 for the protection of wireless infrastructure network, namely, wired equivalent privacy (WEP), Wi-Fi protected access (WPA), and Wi-Fi protected access2 (WPA2), all suffer from DOS attacks. Thus, in this paper, we propose an algorithm for the detection and prevention authentication request flood attacks by using MAC filter buffer for the maintenance and filtering of MAC as well as buffer monitoring. Experimental results of our proposed algorithm show superior performance compared to other methods in terms of detection and prevention. The proposed algorithm has improved the detection performance by 98.4% comparing to the related work.