Securing the Wireless LANs Against Internal Attacks

摘要

Deploying wireless LANs (WLAN) at large scale is mainly affected by reliability, availability, performance, and security. These parameters will be a concern for most of managers who want to deploy WLANs. Most importantly, the security issue became the predominant factor in WLAN design. Different Intrusion detection mechanisms have been addressed in research papers, but with little being focused on internal intrusion and prevention. In this paper an efficient security method has been proposed. It is based on detecting rogue access points as well as rogue bridge access points and denying their access to the WLAN. In addition a new method of mutual authentication between DHCP server at the AP and wireless client has been introduced. This would allow client to detect rogue DHCP server and stop the association with it. It also allows registered DHCP server to detect unauthorized client and deny its request. Moreover the DHCP server would synchronize with the AP or intelligent LAN switch to drop packets from unauthorized client who might use static IP to get access to the network.