WLAN Essay

Introduction

Wireless security is a complex field, but employing a few simple defenses will leave a network far safer against attackers. A wireless local area network (WLAN) is a local area network using high-frequency radio signals to wirelessly connect two or more devices, often to the internet via a wireless access point within a limited geographical area. The millions of WLANs all across the world can be found in homes, coffee shops, and even in international enterprises. Most of the WLANs deployed today are based on the IEEE 802.11 standards for wireless networks. A group known as the Wi-Fi Alliance created the Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) trademark to brand products operating inside a WLAN with the 802.11 IEEE standards.

Manufacturers and network managers use the IEEE 802.11 specifications as a standard for implementing WLANs. The first version of the standard came out in 1997 and was further improved two years later. Since then, the IEEE introduced numerous amendments to improve the initial standard. These include enhanced security with WPA2 (802.11i), protected management frames (802.11w), and higher throughput improvements (802.11n). The IEEE continues to introduce additional functionality as with the recent 802.11ac and 802.11ad amendments, which aim to achieve very high throughput with less than 6 gigahertz and 60 gigahertz respectively. These new developments happen rather quickly, an average of two new amendments per year, but it takes some time for these to be integrated into most commercial devices and networks.

The 802.11 standard is complex and contains numerous concepts that could be abused. It supports up to 14 different channels in the 2.4 gigahertz spectrum, though only 11 of those are usable in the United S...

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... mind. The devices I tested against varied on what attack I was running; some attacks only went up against one device while others had several. The Windows 7 host and Windows XP VM were often used for internal attacks while external ones focused more on smartphones and tablets or the routers themselves. I tried to test the attacks with and without countermeasures in place, but in some cases, countermeasures were not tested due to lack of resources or time constraints. In these cases, I listed defenses or countermeasures known to work, although I was not able to independently verify each one in this experimentation. I will provide a background or introduction on the attack, the categorization of the attack, the details used in performing the attack, the devices tested against, my observations of the attack, and possible countermeasures or defenses against the attack.