WPA3-Personal renders the Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) password-authenticated key agreement method mandatory. The scheme achieves forward secrecy and is highly resistant to offline ...brute-force dictionary attacks. Given that SAE is based on the Dragonfly handshake, essentially a simple password exponential key exchange, it remains susceptible to clogging type of attacks at the Access Point side. To resist such attacks, SAE includes an anti-clogging scheme. To shed light on this contemporary and high-stakes issue, this work offers a full-fledged empirical study on Denial of Service (DoS) against SAE. By utilizing both real-life modern Wi-Fi 6 certified and non-certified equipment and the OpenBSD’s hostapd, we expose a significant number of novel DoS assaults affecting virtually any AP. No less important, more than a dozen of vendor-depended and severe zero-day DoS assaults are manifested, showing that the implementation of the protocol by vendors is not yet mature enough. The fallout of the introduced attacks to the associated stations ranges from a temporary loss of Internet connectivity to outright disconnection. To our knowledge, this work provides the first wholemeal appraisal of SAE’s mechanism endurance against DoS, and it is therefore anticipated to serve as a basis for further research in this timely and intriguing area.
Simultaneous Authentication of Equals (SAE) is a password-authenticated key exchange protocol that is designed to replace the WPA2-PSK-based authentication. The SAE authenticated key exchange ...protocol supports the peer-to-peer authentication and is one of the major authentication mechanisms of the Authentication and Key Management Suite specified within Wi-Fi. The SAE authenticated key exchange protocol has been widely implemented in today’s Wi-Fi devices as part of major security feature upgrades and is regarded as the third generation of Wi-Fi Protected Access. This article presents a way of attacking the weaker randomness generation algorithm within the SAE protocols, which can lead to successful impersonation types of attacks. We also suggest some protocol amendments for protection. It is recommended that SAE implementations should be upgraded to ensure protection against these attacks.
This work serves two key objectives. First, it markedly supplements and extends the well-known AWID corpus by capturing and studying traces of a wide variety of attacks hurled in the IEEE 802.1X ...Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) environment. Second, given that all the 802.11-oriented attacks have been carried out when the defenses introduced by Protected Management Frames (PMF) were operative, it offers the first to our knowledge full-fledged empirical study regarding the robustness of the IEEE 802.11w amendment, which is mandatory for WPA3 certified devices. Under both the aforementioned settings, the dataset, and study at hand are novel and are anticipated to be of significant aid towards designing and evaluating intrusion detection systems. Moreover, in an effort to deliver a well-rounded dataset of greater lifespan, and under the prism of an attacker escalating their assault from the wireless MAC layer to higher ones, we have additionally included several assaults that are common to IEEE 802.3 networks. Since the corpus is publicly offered in the form of raw cleartext pcap files, future research can straightforwardly exploit any subset of features, depending on the particular application scenario.
Wireless networks used widely in office, home, and public places so security is one of the significant issues to keep the transmitted information safe. The applied security standards have been ...developed in response to the demand of high security and the developed hardware with software. Currently, the available security standards are (WEP, WPA, WPA2 and under development WPA3). These security standards are different in the offered security level base on the employed authentication method and encryption algorithms. The major objective of this paper is studying security standards and analyzing them based on their features. In addition to presenting a detailed review about WPA3 and its improvements over the older security standards. The conducted evaluations explained the differences among the Wi-Fi security standards in term of the offered security level, software and hardware requirements.
Attacks on WiFi networks can cause network failures and denial of service for authentic users. To identify such attacks, the deployment of a WiFi Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is crucial. The key ...objective of WiFi IDS is to protect the network by examining WiFi traffic and classifying it as an attack or normal. The state-of-the-art anomaly-based WiFi IDSs use machine learning (ML) to learn the characteristics of past attacks from WiFi traffic datasets. A lot of research is done on advanced ML-based IDSs but work on WiFi-based IDSs is very limited and is based on old ML models. Most of our communications and devices are dependent on WiFi, therefore there is a dire need to update WiFi IDSs with the latest lightweight ML models. Even though old ML models are effective, they have to suffer from large training and testing times along with high computational costs due to large traffic features and outdated algorithms. Moreover, with emerging technologies like the Internet of Things and big data, WiFi traffic is increasing rapidly. Therefore, the issue of computational cost needs to be addressed properly. Thus, in this research, we propose an efficient ML-based WiFi IDS that utilizes a lightweight state-of-the-art ML model and optimum feature selection to reduce computational cost and provide high performance. With the help of MAC layer information and radiotap headers, our WiFi IDS can detect WiFi attacks that go undetected through normal network-based IDS. The proposed WiFi IDS uses a Light Gradient Boosting Machine (LightGBM) that combines several weak learners into a single, better generalizable, strong learner and uses Gradient-based One Side Sampling to downsample data instances with small gradients during training. The experimental results prove that the proposed solution outperforms other classifiers in accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score, training time, and testing time. The proposed solution provides better accuracy with 26 times less training time and 20% less test time compared to XGBoost. The proposed solution can classify real-time WiFi traffic in the order of microseconds and can be trained efficiently with new data.
Association attacks aim to manipulate WiFi clients into associating with a malicious access point, by exploiting protocol vulnerabilities and usability features implemented on the network managers of ...modern operating systems. In this paper we classify association attacks based on the network manager features that each attack exploits. To validate their current validity status, we implement and test all known association attacks against the network managers of popular operating systems, by using our Wifiphisher tool. We analyze various strategies that may be implemented by an adversary in order to increase the success rate of association attacks. Furthermore, we examine the behavior of association attacks against upcoming security protocols and certifications for IEEE 802.11, such as WPA3, Wi-Fi Enhanced Open and Easy Connect. Our results show that even though the network managers have hampered the effectiveness of some known attacks (e.g. KARMA), other techniques (e.g. Known Beacons) are still active threats. More importantly, our results show that even the newer security protocols leave room for association attacks. Finally, we describe novel detection and prevention techniques for association attacks, as well as security controls based on user awareness.
The presence of wireless communication grows undeniably more prevalent each year. Since the introduction of the IEEE 802.11 standard for Wireless Local Area Networks (WLAN) in 1997, technologies have ...progressed to provide wireless accessibility to industries and consumers with growing ease and convenience. As the usage of personal devices, such as phones and watches, that connect to the Internet through Wi-Fi increases, wireless attacks on users are becoming more critical. This paper provides a novel attack model to offer an organized and comprehensive view of the possible attacks on Wi-Fi latest security standards. All existing attacks will be investigated, with emphasis on more recent attacks, such as the KRACK and PMKID Dictionary attacks. The main contribution of this paper is to analyze the technology offered in the new Wi-Fi Protected Access III (WPA3) security scheme and provide the first comprehensive security analysis and discussion to determine whether it has addressed the vulnerabilities of its predecessor. An interesting finding of this paper is that WPA3 still lacks in addressing all the issues existing in WPA2 and exploring other mitigations for future research.
Wi-Fi (802.11) networks have become an essential part of our daily lives; hence, their security is of utmost importance. However, Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3), the latest security certification ...for 802.11 standards, has recently been shown to be vulnerable to several attacks. In this paper, we first describe the attacks on WPA3 networks that have been reported in prior work; additionally, we show that a deauthentication attack and a beacon flood attack, known to be possible on a WPA2 network, are still possible with WPA3. We launch and test all the above (a total of nine) attacks using a testbed that contains an enterprise Access Point (AP) and Intrusion Detection System (IDS). Our experimental results show that the AP is vulnerable to eight out of the nine attacks and the IDS is unable to detect any of them. We propose a design for a signature-based IDS, which incorporates techniques to detect all the above attacks. Also, we implement these techniques on our testbed and verify that our IDS is able to successfully detect all the above attacks. We provide schemes for mitigating the impact of the above attacks once they are detected. We make the code to perform the above attacks as well as that of our IDS publicly available, so that it can be used for future work by the research community at large.
Enhancing the energy efficiency of WiFi IoT stations introduces unique challenges compared to 802.15.4 and BLE. The four essential operations performed to ensure connectivity between stations and the ...access point in a WiFi network are association , periodic beacon reception , maintaining association , and station wake up . Understanding and enhancing these operations are essential for building energy-efficient and dependable IoT systems. However, it is unclear how the software and hardware configuration of station and access point, concurrent traffic, power management, and security protocols affect the reliability and energy efficiency of these operations. In this paper, first, we present a thorough analysis of the association cost of WPA2 and WPA3 and mitigate the effect of key computation on association overhead. Second, we prove that increasing listen interval to reduce beacon reception wake-up duration may negatively impact energy efficiency. We identify the primary causes of this problem subject to link quality estimation algorithm and beacon delay. Third, we show that maintaining association by relying on access-point-based polling is not reliable. In particular, we confirm the wake-up delay of low-power stations is highly affected by factors such as channel utilization and beacon listen interval. We also confirm that key renewal aggravates the chance of disassociation.
The size of wireless networks and the number of wireless devices are growing daily. A crucial part of wireless security involves preventing unauthorized access by using wireless security protocols in ...order to protect the data in wireless networks. In 2018, Wi-Fi Protected Access 3 (WPA3) was ratified to protect the data in devices bearing the Wi-Fi trademark. WPA3 has many security improvements over previous wireless security protocols, by providing a better encryption method and key sharing. In this paper, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted to analyze three aspects of WPA3 protocol: the reasons behind the release of WPA3, the encryption methods and mode of operation in this protocol, and the attacks that remain penetrating WPA3. In this review, thirty-six articles were identified as the selected research articles, written between 2018 and 2023, focusing mainly on WPA3. After the analysis of the selected articles, the encryption methods and modes of operation were presented in the SLR. In addition, the vulnerabilities that the WPA3 protocol solved and the ones that remain unsolved were discussed. This study concluded that WPA3 excels over its predecessors by providing more security and reliability to wireless networks. The result of this SLR of WPA3 proposes two methods that seek to increase the security level of WPA3 networks, which has been discussed in the discussion section.
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