Cisco Wireless LAN Security

Authentication Attacks

DoS attacks are simple, but they can achieve only limited goals. Network access can provide an attacker with much greater benefits. Because gaining physical access to a wireless network is trivial, various schemes have been developed to provide access control. The original 802.11 specification defines a rather broken authentication mechanism to limit which stations can connect to the network. The IEEE has introduced new authentication mechanisms based on 802.1x and EAP. These authentication mechanisms are covered in Chapter 7, “EAP Authentication Protocols for WLANs,” and Chapter 8, “WLAN Encryption and Data Integrity Protocols.” In addition, some vendors have implemented other schemes for access control, such as MAC address ...