Detection and prevention of denial of service attacks (DOS) in WLANs infrastructure

Abstract

Wireless networks are very common today because of their flexibi lity, portability and ease of installation. Users working through wireless connections have to be aware o f the environments due to the vulnerability of the infrastructure and various types of attacks that can be made by the intruders to compromise valuable and critical data. Denial of Service attack (DOS) is t he most significant attack in the wireless 802.11 WLANs. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protecte d Access (WPA) security protocols are used to protect wireless network infrastructure against intrude rs. Despite remarkable advances, both WEP and WPA protocols still suffer from DOS attack because their management and control frame is not encrypted. Integrated Central Manager (ICM) algorithm was proposed to de tect and prevent DOS attacks. However, in ICM, time needed to detect DOS attack is too long. The alg orithm maintains five tables for observing activities in the network. When a client requests for a conne ction, all the five tables needs to be processed; this is increases both network overhead and latency. In This pa per, we proposed an algorithm called Enhanced Integrated Central Manager (EICM) to enhance DOS dete ction and prevention time. The algorithm was evaluated by gathering MAC addresses using Wire shark software and MATLAB was used for simulation. The obtained results demonstrate that that the proposed algorithm outperforms its predecessor in terms of DOS detection and prevention time by decr easing network overhead.