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New vulnerabilities to DoS attacks in Wi-Fi / 802.11 networks Revealed




-/August 10, 2004 - Wi-Fi Technology News/-The use of Wi-Fi / 802.11 wireless networks is steadily increasing despite many studies reporting security problems, Dr. Gianluigi Me, a Professor at the University of Tor Vergata of Rome, Italy and a staff member at the Wi-Fi Technology Forum (Wi-Fi-TF), together with Dr. Francesco Ferreri have just published "New vulnerabilities to DoS attacks in 802.11 networks", a Wi-Fi Security paper highlighting the newly discovered dangers, suggesting remedies and possible defenses.

When you think of DoS (Denial of Service) attacks, you are likely to have in mind the usual disruption to a particular web site having been flooded with millions of requests in the shortest possible time. This action whether malicious or innocent, can slow a site down to a crawl or renders its services unavailable. Some disruption of this sort can however be innocent and can occur as a result of a sudden rise in traffic. 802.11 or Wi-Fi networks DoS attacks present a different picture, altogether probably more lethal than we think.

With the emergence of Wi-Fi Technology, sometimes referred to by such names as Wireless LANs (WLANs), 802.11, Wi-Fi Networks and other traditional names such as wireless networks; are adopted more and more by today's private and public communication networks for their obvious advantages. Cost savings in hardware deployment, freedom of communication by breaking away from wired networks and the "Just In Time" response and feedback that WLANs have to offer, are some of the advantages.


The use of 802.11 wireless networks is steadily increasing despite many studies reporting security problems, mainly related to authentication, privacy and confidentiality issues. Besides that, the peculiar features of the wireless medium suggest a greater exposure to Denial of Service (DoS) attacks than wired networks.


Since the wireless networks do not have well defined physical boundaries, a malicious station can appear in the range of such a network and launch an attack in order to stop any legitimate communication. The aim of this paper is to investigate how this kind of attacks can be carried out. "We identified some simple attack schemes that might lead to a DoS effect and then observed the reaction of various types of infrastructured networks to these attacks", said Dr. Gianluigi Me.

This paper is now available at
http://www.wi-fitechnology.com/Wi-Fi_Reports_and_Papers/

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The Wi-Fi-TF is non-profit worldwide organization manned mostly by staff volunteers. Aims to inform through its successful wi-fi newswire, educate through its various resources available on-site as well as to campaign for cheaper worldwide wireless internet access using wi-fi technology. The Wi-Fi-TF boosts thousands of members, many being important decision makers in their own respective organizations.