MEDIUM ACCESS CONTROL SPOOF DETECTION AND PREVENTION ALGORITHM (MAC SDP DoS) FOR SPOOFING ATTACKS IN WLAN

Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is widely used today because of its mobility and ease of deployment. Providing complete security to the WLAN users is a challenge due to the open nature and undefined boundaries of the wireless networks. This paper is intended to protect the 802.11 WLAN environments from Medium Access Control (MAC) layer Denial of Service (DoS) attacks especially, the deauthentication and disassociation attacks. This paper proposes an algorithm to detect and prevent deauthentication/ disassociation DoS attacks. These attacks are launched due to the vulnerability of the management frames which carries the MAC address of the client or Access Points (AP) that are not encrypted. So, there is an urgent requirement for a security mechanism to prevent MAC layer DoS attacks which does not require any change in the hardware or protocols. In this paper, an algorithm is proposed to detect and prevent MAC spoofing DoS attacks with an exchange of passkey values. The proposed algorithm, MAC Spoof Detection and Prevention (MAC SDP DoS) is compared with the existing algorithm which is used for MAC spoof detection. This algorithm is validated by NS2, a network simulator tool. The proposed algorithm improves the performance of WLAN by increasing the throughput and reduces the packet resend rates to a greater extend. The recovery time has also been reduced compared with the existing method.