Analysing and attacking the 4-way handshake of IEEE 802.11i standard

Abstract

The IEEE 802.11i standard has been designed to enhance security in wireless networks. In the 4-way handshake the supplicant and the authenticator use the pairwise master key (PMK) to derive a fresh pairwise transient key (PTK). The PMK is not used directly for security while assuming the supplicant and authenticator have the same PMK before running 4-way handshake. In this paper, the 4-way handshake phase has been analysed using Isabelle tool to identify a new Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack. The attack prevents the authenticator from receiving message 4 after the supplicant sends it out. This attack forces the authenticator to re-send the message 3 until time out and subsequently to de-authenticate supplicant. This paper has proposed improvements to the 4-way handshake to avoid the Denial-of-Service attack.