802.11 Disassociation DoS Attack and Its Solutions: A Survey

Wireless local area networks provide the connectivity at low cost with greater flexibility and mobility. IEEE 802.11 is the defacto wireless standard. It was designed to provide security however it failed to do so. As a result amendments/enhancements were made to overcome the flaws by first introducing Wi-Fi protected access (WPA) and then IEEE 802.11i. But both these enhancements failed to achieve the desired objectives especially availability. Unauthenticated management and control frames provide no protection against identity theft and are 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 DoS attack and carried out a survey / analysis of various solutions for this attack.