Simulation and analysis of RTS/CTS DoS attack variants in 802.11 networks

Denial-of-Service attacks (DoS) have become a widespread problem on the Internet. These attacks are easy to execute. Low rate attacks are relatively new variants of DoS attacks. Low rate DoS attacks are difficult to detect since attacker sends attack stream with low volume and the countermeasures used to handle the high rate DoS attacks are not suitable for these types of attacks. RTS/CTS attack is one type of Low rate DoS attack. In this paper, we analyze RTS/CTS attack which exploits the medium reservation mechanism of 802.11 networks through duration field. We propose variants of RTS/CTS attacks in wireless networks. We simulate the attacks behaviour in ns2 simulation environment to demonstrate the attack feasibility as well as potential negative impact of these attacks on 802.11 based networks. We have created an application that has the capability to create test bed environment for the attacks, perform RTS/CTS attacks and generate suitable graphs to analyze the attack's behaviour. We also briefly discuss possible ways of detecting and mitigating such Low rate DoS attacks in wireless networks.