A Counter Disassociation Mechanism (CDM) for Wireless LANs and its Performance Simulation Analysis

IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks offer the capability to build a cost efficient network infrastructure that is flexible and mobile. This technology provided an early security mechanism, wired equivalent protocol (WEP), to secure the network, however, that attempt failed to achieve the desired security goals due to holes found in it. Another attempt to rectify the issue was by introducing wi-fi protected access (WPA) scheme, which added more enhancements to both encryption and support for authentication. Despite its robustness and good authentication and encryption characteristics, WPA suffers from a few flaws that can allow attackers to tamper with the deployed network and its availability. In this paper, we introduce a new security scheme, CDM, that attempts to fix a flaw in the disassociation mechanism of the WPA protocol. This vulnerability allows an attacker to shutdown an entire network even for those users that are authorized to use its resources. Results of our proposed scheme are also given.