WLAN Security Analysis And Research On Attack Methods Of WLAN

With the release of IEEE 802.11 Standards in 1999, the Wireless LAN then has been developing rapidly. Compared with the traditional wired LAN, WLAN has been widely applied in all fields of people's life for its convenient and flexible networking programs. However, the exposed security problems have been increasingly serious because of the opening of radio transmission of WLAN.To begin with, this paper introduces the Structure of WLAN and the IEEE 802.11 protocol group. At the same time, the difference and similarity among IEEE 802.11a, IEEE 802.11b and IEEE 802.11g is studied. Then the security mechanism of WLAN is mainly discussed, including the secure technologies of Physical Layer, Data Link Layer and Network Layer. The secure technologies mainly include WEP, WEP2, TKIP, IEEE 802.1X and other technologies. And then the principle of the WEP's algorithm is mainly discussed. Through analysis of WEP, several serious security flaws(eg, key reuse, authentication mechanisms, etc.) are discovered in the protocol. Exploiting these flaws,some approaches are proposed to launch attacks against the WLAN. And then, one of the most common attack methods called Dos attack is simulated and the characteristics of the Dos attack is analysed. Finally, because the Dos attacker is easily tracked, this paper introduces an improved Dos attack program, which the attacker is not easily found and the attack effect is also perfect. After that, this paper applies the new program in the non-AP-based network model and the simulation results show that the attack effect is achieved.