Prevention of DoS and Memory Attacks: Enhanced 3-Way Handshake

Abstract

In today’s world most organizations are moving from wireconnected LAN to wireless LAN. The phenomenal popularity of the 802.11 network standards stems from the fact that they provide for wireless connections with ease and convenience. Recently, security holes have been identified in the operation of 802.11 networks, and the 802.11i protocol has been announced to protect such networks. However, there are still security issues that prevent the 802.11 network from becoming the best choice protocol for wireless LANs. We reviewed 802.11i security with a focus on a denial of service attack. This attack exhausts the client’s memory using a vulnerability of the key derivation procedure in 802.11i. It is vulnerable to various Denial of Service attacks (DoS) which includes de-authentication and disassociation attacks including memory exhaustion attacks. For Dos and memory exhaustion attacks which are possible in 4-way handshake ,this paper provides an enhanced 3-way Handshake algorithm which is free from these attacks in comparison to original protocol and is more secure.