Denial of service attack on low rate wireless personal area networks

Abstract

IEEE 802.15.4 standard is used for low data rate, low power and short-range radio frequency transmission devices to form a personal area network (PAN). As part of the standard, the MAC sublayer provides security services to protect MAC frames while recommends the implementation of security features at higher layers of protocol stack. This work presents a denial of service attack exploiting the PAN ID conflict notification MAC command frame. Further, some simple but effective solutions to address this form of attack is discussed and analysed.