ANM to Perceive and Thwart Denial of Service Attack in WLAN

Abstract

Wireless infrastructure network is vulnerable to Denial of Service (DoS) attack which makes the resources unavailable for its intended user. As an outcome of DoS attack, authenticated user is denied from accessing the network by spoofing legitimate client identity. Reduced protection in management frame led to MAC spoof DoS attack. Though 802.11w was developed to protect the management frame, the network is vulnerable to different DoS attacks and unable to prevent all types of DoS attacks. This motivated us to propose a mechanism to detect and prevent substantial number of DoS attacks. This paper proposes an algorithm called Alternative Numbering Mechanism (ANM) which prevents DoS attacks. The proposed solution is simulated in NS2 for experimentation. Packet delivery ratio, control overhead, normalized routing overhead, delay time, throughput and packet drop were measured for experimentation and to evaluate the performance of ANM. The experimental results of ANM demonstrate that the performance of ANM is encouraging and prevents nearly all types of DoS attacks. Index Terms—Denial of Service Attack, MAC spoof, 802.11w, Wireless Local Area Infrastructure Network, ANM.