Solving Downgrade and DoS Attack Due to the Four Ways Handshake Vulnerabilities (WIFI)

The growing volume of attacks on the Internet has increased the demand for more robust systems and sophisticated tools for vulnerability analysis, intrusion detection, forensic investigations, and possible responses. Current hacker tools and technologies warrant reengineering to address cyber crime and homeland security. The being aware of the flaws on a network is necessary to secure the information infrastructure by gathering network topology, intelligence, internal/external vulnerability analysis, and penetration testing. This paper has as main objective to minimize damages and preventing the attackers from exploiting weaknesses and vulnerabilities in the 4 ways handshake (WIFI).We equally present a detail study on various attacks and some solutions to avoid or prevent such attacks in WLAN

Token-based Fast Authentication for Wireless Network

Wireless Networks based on WIFI or WIMAX become popular and are used in many places as compliment network to wired LAN to support mobility. The support of mobility of clients, the continuous access anywhere and anytime make WLAN preferable network for many applications. However, there are some issues associated with the usage of WLAN that put some restriction on adapting this technology everywhere. These issues are related to using the best routing algorithm to achieve good performance of throughput and delay, and to securing the open access to avoid attacks at the physical and MAC layer. IEEE 802.1x, suggested a solution to address the security issue at the MAC layer and but there are varieties of implementations address this solution and they differ in performance. IEEE 802.1af tried to address other security issue remained at the MAC layer but it is still at early stage and need verification for easy deployment. In this paper a new technique for securing wireless network using fast token-based authentication has been invented to address the vulnerability inherited by the wireless network at the MAC layer using fast authentication process. This technique is based on an authentication server distributing a security token, public authentication key, and network access key parameter to eligible mobile client MCs during registration. All messages will be encrypted during registration using temporary derived token key, but it will use derived valid token key during authentication. Authenticated MCs will then use derived group temporal key generated from the network access parameter key to encrypt all messages exchanged over the wireless network. The token, the authentication key and the access network parameter key will be only distributed during registration. This makes the security parameters known only to authentication server, authenticator and MC. Hence, this technique will protect the wireless network against attack since attackers are unable to know the token and other security keys. Moreover, it will avoid the exchange of public keys during authentication such as the one used in other existing technologies, and consequently speedup the authentication phase which is very critical to wireless technologies

Security in Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs)

Major research domains in the WLAN security include: access control & data frame protection, lightweight authentication and secure handoff. Access control standard like IEEE 802.11i provides flexibility in user authentication but on the other hand fell prey to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. For Protecting the data communication between two communicating devices—three standard protocols i.e., WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy), TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) and AES-CCMP (Advanced Encryption Standard—Counter mode with CBC-MAC protocol) are used. Out of these, AES-CCMP protocol is secure enough and mostly used in enterprises. In WLAN environment lightweight authentication is an asset, provided it also satisfies other security properties like protecting the authentication stream or token along with securing the transmitted message. CAPWAP (Control and Provisioning of Wireless Access Points), HOKEY (Hand Over Keying) and IEEE 802.11r are major protocols for executing the secure handoff. In WLANs, handoff should not only be performed within time limits as required by the real time applications but should also be used to transfer safely the keying material for further communication. In this chapter, a comparative study of the security mechanisms under the above-mentioned research domains is provided

Static and Dynamic 4-Way Handshake Solutions to Avoid Denial of Service Attack in Wi-Fi Protected Access and IEEE 802.11i

This paper focuses on WPA and IEEE 802.11i protocols that represent two important solutions in the wireless environment. Scenarios where it is possible to produce a DoS attack and DoS flooding attacks are outlined. The last phase of the authentication process, represented by the 4-way handshake procedure, is shown to be unsafe from DoS attack. This can produce the undesired effect of memory exhaustion if a flooding DoS attack is conducted. In order to avoid DoS attack without increasing the complexity of wireless mobile devices too much and without changing through some further control fields of the frame structure of wireless security protocols, a solution is found and an extension of WPA and IEEE 802.11 is proposed. A protocol extension with three "static" variants and with a resource-aware dynamic approach is considered. The three enhancements to the standard protocols are achieved through some simple changes on the client side and they are robust against DoS and DoS flooding attack. Advantages introduced by the proposal are validated by simulation campaigns and simulation parameters such as attempted attacks, successful attacks, and CPU load, while the algorithm execution time is evaluated. Simulation results show how the three static solutions avoid memory exhaustion and present a good performance in terms of CPU load and execution time in comparison with the standard WPA and IEEE 802.11i protocols. However, if the mobile device presents different resource availability in terms of CPU and memory or if resource availability significantly changes in time, a dynamic approach that is able to switch among three different modalities could be more suitable

Security Features in a Hybrid Software-Defined Network

The paper presents a novel paradigm of software-defined network that is significantly different from previous traditional networks and enables new opportunities in the architecture and implementation of security solutions. The analysis of network environments will compare traditional networks and software-defined networks and emphasize significant differences. A survey of the existing research includes vector attacks and troubleshooting using the capabilities of SDN with an emphasis on access control, detection, and prevention of attacks. This paper uses previous research and results to obtain information that will be used in improving critical system network protection and compares it with the existing conventional approach as well as implements it through a hybrid software-defined network

Secure and Privacy-Preserving Authentication Protocols for Wireless Mesh Networks

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) have emerged as a promising concept to meet the challenges in next-generation wireless networks such as providing flexible, adaptive, and reconfigurable architecture while offering cost-effective solutions to service providers. As WMNs become an increasingly popular replacement technology for last-mile connectivity to the home networking, community and neighborhood networking, it is imperative to design efficient and secure communication protocols for these networks. However, several vulnerabilities exist in currently existing protocols for WMNs. These security loopholes can be exploited by potential attackers to launch attack on WMNs. The absence of a central point of administration makes securing WMNs even more challenging. The broadcast nature of transmission and the dependency on the intermediate nodes for multi-hop communications lead to several security vulnerabilities in WMNs. The attacks can be external as well as internal in nature. External attacks are launched by intruders who are not authorized users of the network. For example, an intruding node may eavesdrop on the packets and replay those packets at a later point of time to gain access to the network resources. On the other hand, the internal attacks are launched by the nodes that are part of the WMN. On example of such attack is an intermediate node dropping packets which it was supposed to forward. This chapter presents a comprehensive discussion on the current authentication and privacy protection schemes for WMN. In addition, it proposes a novel security protocol for node authentication and message confidentiality and an anonymization scheme for privacy protection of users in WMNs.Comment: 32 pages, 10 figures. The work is an extended version of the author's previous works submitted in CoRR: arXiv:1107.5538v1 and arXiv:1102.1226v

A Novel Design and Implementation of Dos-Resistant Authentication and Seamless Handoff Scheme for Enterprise WLANs

With the advance of wireless access technologies, the IEEE 802.11 wireless local area network (WLAN) has gained significant increase in popularity and deployment due to the substantially improved transmission rate and decreased deployment costs. However, this same widespread deployment makes WLANs an attractive target for network attacks. Several vulnerabilities have been identified and reported regarding the security of the current 802.11 standards. To address those security weaknesses, IEEE standard committees proposed the 802.11i amendment to enhance WLAN security. The 802.11i standard has demonstrated the capability of providing satisfactory mutual authentication, better data confidentiality, and key management support, however, the design of 802.11i does not consider network availability. Thus 802.11i is highly susceptible to malicious denial-of-service (DoS) attacks, which exploit the vulnerability of unprotected management frames. This paper proposes, tests and evaluates a combination of three novel methods by which the exploitation of 802.11i by DoS attacks can be improved. These three methods include an access point nonce dialogue scheme, a fast access point transition protocol handoff scheme and a location management based selective scanning scheme. This combination is of particular value to real-time users running time-dependant applications such as VoIP. In order to acquire practical data to evaluate the proposed schemes, a prototype network has been implemented as an experimental testbed using open source tools and drivers. This testbed allows practical data to be collected and analysed. The result demonstrates that not only the proposed authentication scheme eradicates most of the DoS vulnerabilities, but also substantially improved the handoff performance to a level suitable for supporting real-time services