The Research And Improvement Of IEEE802.11 Protocol Security

With the accelerating spread of wireless devices, the demand for wireless security is growing in those enterprises, finance, education and other industries. Since the data of Wireless LAN transmits through radio frequency, it's easy for malicious attackers to eavesdrop. The wireless access point (AP) is vulnerable to Denial-of-servie (DoS) attacks due to the broadcast nature of wireless communication. Compared with wired networks, wireless local area network is difficult to use physical control measures, thereby protecting wireless local area network is more difficult than protecting wired networks.Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol used within the IEEE 802.11 standard has "major security flaws" thus wireless local area networks (WLANs) using the protocol are vulnerable to attacks. In this paper, we propose a scrambling algorithm that reduces the security vulnerabilities of the WEP. The algorithm randomizes the data and prevents access from unauthorized users by adding some randomness to it. In this approach the randomness is achieved by RC4 algorithm, and the distribution of the randomness is provided with different algorithms to increase the complexity of rectifying the encrypted data and optimize utilization of the randomness. The algorithm is developed with a consideration for the least computational requirements. The proposed software solution takes the WEP output as input and the original WEP implementation is not touched, thus it is easy patch for deployed systems.In addition to improving the weakness in the IEEE802.11 protocol, it's necessary to guard against the most common attacks in wireless networks. Standard off-the-shelf equipment is sufficient for a malicious station to disrupt the service between access points and stations. In this paper we present a systematic survey of DoS attacks, Available countermeasures against DoS attacks are discussed and compared. We proposed a 802.11 extended security module against DDoS (Distribution DoS) from overall point of view, which offers a number of constructive and instructive comments for future IEEE802.11 standard.