Pseudo Randomized Sequence Number Based Solution to 802.11 Disassociation Denial of Service Attack

Wireless local area networks (WLAN) provide network connectivity and flexibility at a very low cost. Last two decades have seen the exponential growth in this area. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ratified IEEE standard 802.11 in 1999, which is the defacto wireless standard. Security flaws were soon detected in this standard, and as a result amendments / enhancements were introduced. IEEE 802.1 li a security enhancement, was ratified in 2004. It was designed to address wireless security issues however it also has some flaws and fails to achieve desired objectives especially availability. Unauthenticated management and control frames open the vulnerability of identity theft and are the main cause of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. Spoofed disassociation messages can successfully be used to launch DoS attacks. In this paper we have explained the Spoofed disassociation DoS attack and proposed a robust solution to this attack.