Denial-of-service attacks in wireless networks using off-the-shelf hardware

Abstract

Wireless network technologies offer ubiquitous broadband access to millions of users at an affordable cost. However, the broadband nature of the wireless medium make these networks vulnerable to a number of attacks. Malicious interference at the physical layer, and extended packet collisions at the medium access layer can cause significant DoS attacks. In this work, we show how off-the-shelf hardware can be used to create devastating DoS attacks in a IEEE 802.11 network. Moreover, we present two algorithms for attack detection that are based on the cumulative sum algorithm. © 2014 Springer International Publishing Switzerland.