Wireless LAN Vulnerabilities And Attack Approach Research

Wireless LAN has some advantages as follows: its agility and convenience to organize the network, fast to access, costs low on maintenance. There's a huge market in front of its application because of such advantages. With the development of the WLAN, great concerns are raised when it comes to wireless security. The current security standard in IEEE 802.11 is known to be quite insecure, it can not provide sufficient protect against attacks.This thesis carefully investigated the communications principle and security mechanism of IEEE802.11 WLAN. Investigated the problem of WEP protocol aim at the current security mechanism vulnerabilities of WLAN, such as the initialization vector collision in WEP, the core algorithm of WEP has the weak keys problem, message modification and authentications poof. Discussed denial of service (DoS) attacks in the environment of wireless LAN (WLAN) and propose a novel attack method by modifying the short inter-frame space (SIFS).Studied the authentication system, the key management and the data link security protocols of TKIP and CCMP in IEEE802.11i and analyzed their security performance and vulnerabilities. Studied IPSec architecture and main protocols which include Authentication Header (AH), Encapsulating Security Payload (ESP) and Internet key exchange (IKE). Analyzed the security performance and vulnerabilities of IKE protocol.This thesis carries out WLAN WEP key crack attack experiment to secret key vulnerability of RC4 arithmetic, and obtain the Key successfully. Experimentalized the DoS attack by using SIFS vulnerability. The experiment result indicate that this kind of DoS attack takes high efficiency.