| 802.11 WLANs suffer from a number of security problems. Design flaws and attacks exploiting these flaws have been reported. In particular, the management frames in 802.11 WLANs are not protected. A number of attacks such as denial of service, impersonation and man-in-the-middle can be launched by exploiting these unprotected management frames. Even the newly ratified 802.11i security standard does not address this issue.; In this thesis, a per-frame authentication scheme to authenticate 802.11 management frames is presented. With this scheme, every frame received by the wireless client or access point is first authenticated and then the corresponding management function carried out. In addition, it is compatible with the original 802.11 standard.; In addition, a prototype of this scheme has been implemented. Tests show that this scheme prevents a variety of attacks that can be launched on 802.11 WLANs by exploiting management frames. |
