Detection of DoS Attacks on Wi-Fi Networks Using IoT Sensors

Abstract

IoT has become a primary target for data theft. There is a legal risk if disconnection of a user from a network occurs frequently. Moreover, service providers would be accountable to the financial and legal issues if they fail to provide network services. Such vulnerabilities are the deauthentication attack, beacon flooding attack, and probe request flooding attack during which on behalf of a target computer, an attacker sends spoofed frames to an access point (AP) essentially refusing its access to the network. IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) contains the provision for a deauthentication frame. It also has beacon, probe request, and probe response frames which are unencrypted. Wi-Fi deauthentication attack, beacon flooding attack, and probe request flooding attack are types of denial of service (DoS) attack. They target the communication between a user and a Wi-Fi access point (AP) by spoofing the MAC address of AP. The scope of this project is to design a real-time IoT network model to detect the deauthentication attack, beacon flooding attack, and probe request flooding attack. This model can find which AP gets the respective frames. This technique can be easily deployed on open as well as encrypted networks. Proposed model is implemented by using ESP8266 Wi-Fi module. It can detect these attacks in wireless LANs (WLANs) by displaying/extracting the victim BSSID. It has the launcher and detector scripts to be used in the developing of the proposed model. Besides, this lightweight model can detect attacks with high accuracy and low false positive rate.