Wifi Technology 24072013111601 Wifi Technology

www.SeminarsTopics.
com
A Technical Seminar Report On

“WI-FI”
Submitted to Jawaharlal Nehru Technological University for the partial
Fulfillment of the Requirement for the Award of the Degree of
Bachelor of Technology
In
Computer Science & Engineering
By
UDAY KUMAR. S (07D31A04A6)
DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING

INDUR INSTITUTE OF ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY
SIDDIPET
Approved by A.I.C.T.E
Affiliated to JNTU, HYDERABAD
2007-2011
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www.SeminarsTopics.com
INDEX
1. Introduction………………………………………….….........1
2. Importance of Wi-Fi………….………………….……….…3
3. Dependability ...….…………………………………………..4
4. Vulnerabilities at the physical layer…………….……........12
5. Vulnerabilities at the Mac layer………………….….……15
6. Future…………………………………………..…………..20
7. Conclusion……………………………………..…………..22
8. References…………………………………………..……...23
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1. INTRODUCTION
Wi-Fi short for “wireless fidelity”—is the commercial name for the 802.11
products that have flooded the corporate wireless local area network (WLAN) market and
are becoming rapidly ingrained in our daily lives via public hotspots and digital home
networks. It is a trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance, founded in 1999 as Wireless Ethernet
Compatibility Alliance (WECA), comprising more than 300 companies, whose products
are certified by the Wi-Fi Alliance, based on the IEEE 802.11 standards (also called
Wireless LAN (WLAN) and Wi-Fi). Wi-fi is a wireless technology that uses radio
frequency to transmit data through the air.A Wi-Fi enabled device such as a PC game
console, mobile phone, MP3 player or PDA can connect to the Internet when within
range of a wireless network connected to the Internet. The coverage of one or more
interconnected access points called a hotspot can comprise an area as small as a single
room with wireless-opaque walls.There are three types of wireless technology, the
802.11b, the 802.11a, and the 802.11g. The first two are more commonly used, compared
to the last one. The difference of the first two is that the 802.11a is newer compared to the
other and is about five times faster than the 802.11b. The advantage of the 802.11g
technology is that it is backwards compatible with both the 802.11a and the 802.11b
technology. And this is a big step forward in the wireless networking world.
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Figure showing WiFi Zone
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2. IMPORTANCE OF WIFI
WIFI gives you an extremely large amount of freedom because you can basically
use it from anywhere. From your couch to your local shopping mall, wireless fidelity can
always lend a helping hand. Also, WIFI is not restricted to certain groups. No matter who
you are, you can use it. And, on top of its convenience, WIFI is fast, reliable, and easy to
use. In the corporate enterprise, wireless LANs are usually implemented as the final link
between the existing wired network and a group of client computers. This gives these
users wireless access to the full resources and services of the corporate network across a
building or campus setting.
Wireless Fidelity is important to the wireless LAN world, because it is securely

tested to assure operability of equipment of the same frequency band and feature. WIFI is
the certification logo given by the WIFI Alliance for equipments that passes the tests for
compatibility for IEEE 802.11 standards. The WIFI Alliance organization, is a nonprofit
organization that promotes the acceptance of 802.11 wireless technology and they
ensures all WIFI certified 802.11 based wireless networking equipments works with all
other WIFI certified equipments of the same frequency. The WIFI Alliance works with
technical-groups like the IEEE and other companies that are developing new wireless
networking equipments.
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3. DEPENDABILITY
WiFi is becoming rapidly ingrained in our daily lives via public hotspots and
digital home networks. However, because a technology’s dependability requirements are
proportional to its pervasiveness, newer applications mandate a deeper understanding of
how much we can rely on WiFi and its security promises. Authentication and
confidentiality are crucial issues for corporate WiFi use, but privacy and availability tend
to dominate pervasive usage. So far, WiFi hasn’t had the best track record: researchers
and hackers easily defeated its first security mechanism, Wired Equivalent Privacy
(WEP). Although the 802.11i standard addresses this failure and the larger issues of
confidentiality and authentication, no ongoing standardization effort handles WiFi
availability, and problems with robustness mean that a successful attack can block a
network and its services, at least for the attack’s duration. Another oft-neglected aspect of
802.11 networks is privacy—not payload confidentiality but node activity monitoring.
This kind of monitoring has value on its own (for example, for contrasting user
identification and location), but it also has a strong link to dependability in attacks
targeted at a specific node.
To our knowledge, no current practical or theoretical framework handles WiFi

dependability issues. Moreover, no previous work has analyzed WiFi security from this
viewpoint. Most research examines WiFi confidentiality and authentication by explaining
the problems related to native 802.11 security and showing how inadequate such
mechanisms are. The same effort hasn’t been put into analyzing a wireless network’s
availability and robustness: in fact, many denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against WLANs
are known, but so far only one research effort describes the actual implementation of two
DoS attacks and possible countermeasures.
We present an overview of WiFi vulnerabilities and investigate their proximate

and ultimate origins. The intended goal is to provide a foundation to discuss WiFi
dependability and its impact on current and future usage scenarios. Although a wireless
network’s overall security depends on the network stack to the application layer, this
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report focuses on specific vulnerabilities at the physical (PHY) and data (MAC) layers of
802.11 networks.
The OSI Layer
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HOW DOES IT WORK?

Wireless Internet Access has four components that form its structure: high-speed access,
a networking gateway, a wireless network and a wireless customer. The customer
connects wirelessly through the wireless network to the gateway, it then launches their
internet browser, authenticates through the gate-way by entering a coupon code or
purchasing time and the user has high-speed internet.
The four components are:
1) High-speed access which is also known as broadband is an internet connection which

is generally faster than dial up service. Examples of high-speed internet access are ISDN,
cable modem, DSL, and also satellite services.
2) Network Gateway is between your high-speed access connection and the wireless
network, it acts like a gate. This gate will prevent people from accessing your wireless
network unless you know about it, the gateway also allows managing tools as well. These
can include authentication, network monitoring, and other services such as printing and
voice over IP.
3) Wireless local area network is a system of connecting PC's and other devices within
the same physical proximity using high-frequency radio waves instead of wires. Wireless
networks work as long as your wireless ready device is within range.
4) Wireless customers are people who have a PC and a wireless adapter which means
they can access the internet wirelessly. The wireless adapter can be built in or it can be an
external device plugged into your computer.
ADDING WI-FI TO A COMPUTER

One of the best things about WiFi is how simple it is. Many new laptops already come
with a WiFi card built in -- in many cases you don't have to do anything to start using
WiFi. It is also easy to add a WiFi card to an older laptop or a desktop PC . Here's what
you do:
 Buy a 802.11a, 802.11b or 802.11g network card. 802.11g has the advantage of
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higher speeds and good interoperability on 802.11b equipment.
 For a laptop, this card will normally be a PCMCIA card that you slide into a
PCMCIA slot on your laptop. Or you can buy a small external adapter and plug it
into a USB port.
 For a desktop machine, you can buy a PCI card that you install inside the
machine, or a small external adapter that you connect to the computer with a USB
cable.
 Install the card
 Install the drivers for the card
 Find an 802.11 hotspot
 Access the hotspot.
A hotspot is a connection point for a WiFi network. It is a small box that is hardwired
into the Internet . The box contains an 802.11 radio that can simultaneously talk to up to
100 or so 802.11 cards. There are many WiFi hotspots now available in public places like
restaurants, hotels, libraries and airports . You can also create your own hotspot in your
home, as we will see in a later section.
CONFIGURING WIFI
On the newest machines, an 802.11 card will automatically connect with an 802.11
hotspot and a network connection will be established. As soon as you turn on your
machine, it will connect and you will be able to browse the Web, send email, etc. using
WiFi. On older machines you often have to go through this simple 3-step process to
connect to a hotspot:
 Access the software for the 802.11 card -- normally there is an icon for the card
down in the system tray at the bottom right of the screen.
 Click the "Search button" in the software. The card will search for all of the
available hotspots in the area and show you a list.
 Double-click on one of the hotspots to connect to it.
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On ancient 802.11 equipment, there is no automatic search feature. You have to find what
is known as the SSID of the hotspot (usually a short word of 10 characters or less) as well
as the channel number (an integer between 1 and 11) and type these two pieces of
information in manually. All the search feature is doing is grabbing these two pieces of
information from the radio signals generated by the hotspot and displaying them for you.
SECURITY
WiFi has had, and continues to have several security issues. In September of 1999 WEP
(Wired Equivalent Privacy) was the standard for wireless PC’s. WEP is used in the
physical and data link layers, and was designed to give wireless LANs the same security
that wired LANs had. WEP provided security by encrypting the data while it traveled
from one end point to the other. Unlike wired LANs who’s networks are usually inside of
a building where it’s protected wireless LANs are more vulnerable due to the fact that the
data travels over radio waves which are much easier to intercept. Another reason WEP is
vulnerable is because in some corporations the managers do not change the shared keys
for months or years at a time. That is way too long for the key to be in use, with that
much time the key can get into the wrong hands, which could be disastrous for the
corporation.
In 2002 the wireless LANs security was upgraded when Wi-Fi Protected Access
(WPA) was introduced. WPA had several improvements like better encryption, and it
also used the RADIUS-based 802.1X, which authorizes the user to gain access to the ISP
provider. Also the setup for WPA was much simpler than the setup for WEP. WPA came
in two types, Enterprise which was used for corporations, and also Personal which was
used for home users.
In June of 2004 802.11i was completed and became the new and current standard
for Wi-Fi. 802.11i is also known as Wi-Fi Protected Access 2(WPA2). WPA and WPA2
have several of the same qualities, but WPA2 upgraded its encryption of data with the
Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). There is a problem with AES however, and the
problem is that this could require hardware upgrades for many wireless LANs. WPA2 is
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compatible with WPA products, and consumers can upgrade to WPA2 easily. However
WPA2 is not compatible with the original Wi-Fi standard WEP. Also like WPA, WPA2
has two versions, WPA2 Enterprise is for corporations, and WPA2 Personal is for the
home users.
Many corporations today use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to send and
receive important information. Virtual Private Networks use the internet to send and
receive information by creating a tunnel connecting the two end users. VPN encrypts the
data to keep any hackers from stealing the information while it is being sent. To use a
VPN the two end users must be using the same authentic protocol or it will not work. The
authentic protocol gives only certain users access to certain information.
There are several other ways to protect your wireless computer and the
information that is stored on it. One of the first things you should do is to change the
default information on your wireless router. The reason for this is that many hackers have
gained access to the default information from the different companies who create the
wireless PC’s, which makes it easier for them to get into your computer information. You
should also have strong passwords on your wireless computers to keep the hackers from
getting into your sensitive data. Another way to protect yourself is to download firewalls
onto your computer. Firewalls monitor, and restrict the traffic that comes in and out of
your computer. Downloading anti-virus software onto your computer is another way to
protect your computer. You should update your anti-virus software often, because within
one month there are at least 10 to 50 new viruses, or worms that the anti-virus software is
not capable of protecting your computer against. If you take your personal wireless
computer out in public you should turn off your file sharing. Keeping your file sharing
on is an easy way for hackers to get into your system. Also when you are not on your
computer, you should turn it off. This is the surest way to keep hackers out of your
computer files. They can’t get into the system if it’s not on. There are several other ways
that you can protect your sensitive data, but these are a few simple things that everyone
should do to protect themselves, and their data.
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WI-FI SECURITY
WiFi hotspots can be open or secure. If a hotspot is open, then anyone with a WiFi card
can access the hotspot. If it is secure, then the user needs to know a WEP key to connect.
WEP stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy, and it is an encryption system for the data that
802.11 sends through the air. WEP has two variations: 64-bit encryption (really 40-bit)
and 128-bit encryption (really 104-bit). 40-bit encryption was the original standard but
was found to be easily broken. 128-bit encryption is more secure and is what most people
use if they enable WEP.
For a casual user, any hotspot that is using WEP is inaccessible unless you know the
WEP key.
If you are setting up a hotspot in your home, you may want to create and use a 128-bit
WEP key to prevent the neighbors from casually eavesdropping on your network.
Whether at home or on the road, you need to know the WEP key, and then enter it into
the WiFi card's software, to gain access to the network.
The Wi-Fi Alliance recently announced Wi-Fi Direct, a new peer-to-peer protocol that
will enable direct connections between Wi-Fi client devices, allowing users to do
everything from syncing data between a smartphone and a laptop to displaying pictures
on a flat screen television or printing them on a wireless printer—all without requiring
the user to join a traditional Wi-Fi network.
The WFA intends to finalize the specification by the end of 2009, and to begin certifying
products in mid-2010. In the meantime, many chip manufacturers (and Wi-Fi Alliance
member companies) are offering their own pre-specification solutions, including Atheros
Direct Connect, Intel My WiFi Technology, and Marvell Mobile Hotspot—all of which
should be easily upgradeable to the final specification next year.
In fact, interoperability with legacy devices is a key benefit of the protocol: not only will
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Wi-Fi Direct generally require just a simple software upgrade, but only one of the
connecting devices (not both) has to be certified to the new specification.
“Any Wi-Fi CERTIFIED a or g device out there can make Wi-Fi Direct connections with
devices that have been certified to the protocol,” says Wi-Fi Alliance marketing director
Kelly Davis-Felner.
And Davis-Felner says it’s crucial to understand that Wi-Fi Direct is significantly
different from (and much more secure than) ad hoc mode. “It has WPA2 security
protections in place, and should be quite a bit easier to enable and use than ad hoc
historically has been—and of course we expect it to be much more widely deployed,” she
says.
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4. VULNERABILITIES AT THE PHY LAYER
WiFi uses a single narrow-band radio channel on a public frequency. Radio

communications are typically multiplexed and based on some combination of space,
frequency, time, and coding—WiFi exploits the first three. Current WiFi networks rely
on two different basic coding techniques: the Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS),
which 11b and 11g devices use, and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing
(OFDM), which 11a and 11g devices use. Nodes on the same frequency share a single
channel, which the 802.11 MAC layer serializes through random access and contention
mechanisms. These characteristics allow for several attacks, which we’ll discuss in more
detail in the following subsections
 Interception
It’s not surprising that an attacker can intercept a radio communication, but the
threat’s relevance clearly depends on the nature of the leaked information. Most
cryptographic protocols address content eavesdropping but pay little attention to privacy
issues. The 802.11 standard never uses mechanisms for preventing traffic analysis, so it’s
fairly easy to infer the number of “talking” nodes, their identities and who’s talking to
whom. This lets an attacker violate user privacy.
The prologue of any content-eavesdropping attack is channel selection.

Unfortunately, the limited number of channels and frequencies in WiFi devices make this
step trivial—moreover, any 802.11 device has built-in capabilities to scan and report
activity on all available channels.
In general, today’s narrow-band radio technologies can’t hide communication. We

must therefore accept that interception is easy, especially because radio coverage area
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can’t be delimited precisely. Physical anti-interception techniques aren’t fit for common
WiFi usage scenarios.
 Injection
Radio transmission, can’t be confined in a restricted area, so WiFi relies on

logical access control mechanisms for authorized access. However, this heavily limits the
validity of well-established security tools such as firewalls and network intrusion
detection systems, so authorized traffic is instead validated as it flows over the wireless
link. In practice, though, this activity constrains the upper network layers in their attempt
to provide specific security mechanisms. As a solution, the MAC level could provide data
source authentication for every transmitted frame by identifying the source as a specific
node or as a member of a trusted group.
 Jamming
Radio communications are subject to jamming, which is cheap and easy to do in a

narrow-band channel such as the one WiFi devices occupy. Jamming can make corporate
WLANs unavailable, which is certainly annoying, or even block a residential phone
network or hospital medical infrastructure, which is much scarier. The WiFi nodes
themselves can easily detect a jam because each station already monitors channel quality
for AP and bit-rate selection, but locating the actual attacker is a different story.
 Locating mobile nodes
Wandering through a wireless world, an attacker can easily track MAC

addresses and build a database that lists wireless nodes, their locations, and their
movements, even for wearable devices such as PDAs. Although a wireless node’s exact
position might be hard to get, it’s much easier to detect its presence in a large area. If the
device is a personal one, this could even help someone track the device owner’s location.
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 Hijacking
Man-in-the-middle attacks are a traditional threat against access control

solutions. Although it’s easy for attackers to intercept wireless traffic and inject an attack,
it isn’t trivial to hijack a wireless channel. The attacker must ensure that the two victims
can’t talk directly, thus the targets must either lie outside each other’s radio range or be
desynchronized. An attacker can try to jam the receiver while still being able to access
the transmitted traffic—for example, by using directional antennas or a set of two probes
near the sender and the receiver.
 Energy
Batteries are a key enabling factor for mobility in radio networks, but a limited
energy supply can easily become a perfect target for availability attacks. Although
breakthroughs in energy production technology will hopefully mitigate this problem, the
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short-term impact on security is twofold: power-conservation features and their

protection become vital, and any security mechanism must be carefully evaluated against
its energy cost.
5. VULNERABILITIES AT THE MAC LAYER
Although it inherits the underlying PHY layer’s insecurity, the 802.11 MAC
layer adds some peculiar weaknesses of its own. Its “dangerous” features are that it
implements a shared channel and must synchronize among different parties, making it
much more complex than Ethernet. These three broad categories leave the network open
to several different vulnerabilities.
 Shared channel
When many nodes use the same channel, their traffic must be distinguishable—
accordingly, 802.11 networks use a MAC address as a static station identifier. A shared
channel also implies a shared bandwidth, thus transmission speed lowers if several nodes
use it simultaneously. It might seem that limiting the number of users per cell would
guarantee an adequate bandwidth per node, but this doesn’t really work because the
802.11 MAC layer allows the coexistence of many independent cells on the same
physical channel, each with its own nodes. The 802.11e standard deals with providing
quality of service over WiFi networks via traffic prioritization mechanisms, but these
mechanisms rely fully on the existing MAC layer, its rules, and, more important, its
vulnerabilities. As such, the proposed quality-of-service mechanisms don’t enforce
availability.
 Synchronization
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Anything that’s simple in a wired environment (such as network cables plugged

into wall sockets) must be emulated with special frames in the wireless world, which can
lead to problems when synchronizing state transitions between two or more entities. As in
any system in which two or more parties must remain synchronized to work, a successful
desynchronization forced by an attacker leads to a system malfunction.
 Upper levels
Applications that deal with personal information are extremely vulnerable to data
capture and disclosure. At first glance, home banking might seem to be the most sensitive
application, but most banks provide secure access through their SSL channels. The real
issue here is privacy—most services typically aren’t protected in the network stack’s
upper layers and carry information that attackers can use to profile and track potential
victims.
Vulnerabilities typically narrow the available bandwidth, and a narrow channel

incurs delays that can hurt real-time services—as noted earlier, multimedia streams in
particular are very sensitive to delays in packet delivery because they directly affect
quality of service.
 Lab experience
The analysis we’ve presented so far raises a key question: how real are the threats
we’ve outlined? To answer that question, we built some attack tools that exploit a few of
the vulnerabilities discussed here and tested them against a small WiFi network in our
labs. Every test had three key objectives: to understand whether the attack could really be
implemented from commercial off-the-shelf components, to determine the actual effects
on WiFi activity, and to figure out how to isolate the attack with an intrusion detection
module.
All the attacks we tested use off-the-shelf hardware and open source device
drivers, and are fairly easy to do.Under some attack conditions, the target network was
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completely blocked for the test’s whole duration. A packet capture engine could detect
almost all the attacks, and all of them introduced various anomalies in network behavior.
 MAC-level jamming
Our version of the jamming attack consisted of a special test mode already
available in the devices we used, which gave us continuous transmission regardless of
MAC-level access rules. This caused constant collisions with every other station in the
cell, which was then totally blocked. Because colliding stations back off and don’t
transmit for some time. The tests have shown that a 10 percent jamming period was
enough to halt transmission in a cell.The jamming effect spanned across three adjacent
WiFi channels, but this attack didn’t require packet injection techniques and thus was
hardly detectable with a network-layer intrusion detection system.
 Multimedia performance
By forging the appropriate frame (for example, an empty data frame with the
power management bit set), we could make AP believe that the victim was in power-save
mode so that it could start buffering traffic for it. This caused delays in traffic delivery,
which especially hurt our real-time traffic—in fact; we could stop a Real-Time Protocol
(RTP) flow with this attack. Of course, the victim’s precise behavior depends on the
power-save mode’s device driver implementation. But some drivers always react upon
receipt of the traffic information map (TIM is a part of every beacon frame and
announces the presence of buffered traffic) and tell the AP that they’re not in power-save
mode, thus mitigating the attack’s effects. Other drivers ignore the TIM if the station isn’t
in power-save mode and thus suffer the attack’s whole effects.
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Potential applications
Andy Davidson, senior director of software engineering at Atheros, says Wi-Fi Direct is
ultimately about enabling connections on the fly. “If you’re sitting at home, obviously,
you have all your own devices connected to your access point—but if a guest comes over
and has a Wi-Fi phone, and wants to show you some pictures from it, it would be nice if
they could easily show the pictures on your TV,” he says.
That kind of functionality, Davidson says, opens up a wide variety of potential

applications.
“Wi-Fi for wireless Internet access is obviously very popular, but to also be able to use it
to share files, to share photographs, to print documents…to be able to push a presentation
to the people you’re presenting to—all of these usages, I think, are just going to make
Wi-Fi technology all the more desirable,” he says.
Intel senior product manager Gary Martz says Wi-Fi Direct will drive a fundamental shift
in the way most people use Wi-Fi. “Wi-Fi Direct is the specification that’s going to take
Wi-Fi from just being a networking technology to being a mass market consumer
technology for connecting your devices…without ever having to know what an SSID is,
or what WPA2 security is, or what Wi-Fi Protected Setup is,” he says.
Still, Martz says it will inevitably take some time for Wi-Fi Direct to reach the enterprise.
“Consumers are going to grow to love it, and then you’re going to see an evolution—just
as with a lot of new technologies in the corporate space—where it flows from the
consumer to small and medium businesses, and then the corporate IT manager puts some
miles on it in validation, and then they’ll start to roll it out,” he says.
Enterprise security
To that end, Martz says, the specification places a premium on security. “We developed
Wi-Fi Direct to have separate security domains, so your wireless LAN connection is a
separate security domain from your Wi-Fi Direct network,” he says. “And the corporate
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IT manager can manage that crossover—does he want to allow that crossover, or does he
want to firewall it?”
The IT manager’s answer to that question, inevitably, depends upon the application. “In
the case of allowing a guest to the corporate environment to have access to a printer,
those security domains are going to be firewalled, so that he can securely provide print
capabilities to a visitor without compromising anything on his corporate wireless LAN,”
Martz says.
For consumers, though, the real concern is ease of use. Sameer Bidichandani, senior
director of technology strategy at Marvell, says Wi-Fi Direct’s simplicity is a key
strength, particularly for the average consumer who doesn’t know the difference between
an AP and a client. “Ease of use is a huge factor here, and ease of use drives volume,” he
says. “As it gets easier to use, more people buy and use it and like it—and that’s how the
industry as a whole benefits.”
Finally, Bidichandani says, another key benefit of the protocol lies in the simple fact that
it’s software, not hardware. “Every device that we’ve shipped in the embedded space that
goes into cell phones, gaming platforms, MP3 players… or even printers and plugged-in
gaming platforms, can benefit from this—with just a software upgrade,” he says.
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6. FUTURE
Originally, Wi-Fi was just a hack so that people could connect a notebook to a
network via wireless using a spectrum that didn't have to be paid for. No one expected it
to grow so fast, and to become used so widely. The fact that it has spread like wildfire has
caused many kinds of technology companies, from wireless cell phone providers to
network hardware manufacturers, to rethink their businesses Thus far, we’ve made it
clear that WiFi isn’t ready for critical applications, mainly because of its intrinsic
robustness problems. But next-generation wireless networks need modern security
features, and WiFi will have to provide extensions and changes to maintain its supremacy
among the various wireless data technologies.
Jamming attacks have so far gone unstopped, and their effects are devastating.
Researchers have suggested various approaches to prevent them, but a recent approach to
detecting them is to monitor the channel and share what each node sees, to create a
“global view” of the network. Any approach that improves wireless networks’ anonymity
could also help with robustness: the traffic related to a specific node would be more
difficult to select and jam.
At the physical level, a new radio technology that can greatly help with
robustness problems is ultra wide band (UWB).UWB could potentially exploit its
extreme large bandwidth to hide communication channels by frequency hopping, which
makes interception harder and jamming at least more manifest.UWB offers a key security
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property: In general, knowledge of exact locations can help prevent man-in-the-middle

attacks, and inconsistencies between a node’s actual position and the one the peer
perceives can point out the presence of an attacker in the middle. .
The main research issue is how to design a robust secure wireless channel, but this field
lacks both theoretical and practical literature. The general problem here is how to identify
and reject fake events at the MAC level. The MAC layer can quickly identify malicious
events by making security mechanisms aware of specific wireless information, such as
frequency, location, or distance. We can easily extend some 802.11 frames to carry
additional pieces of information.
When trying to generalize the approach to detecting fake MAC-level events, the
natural direction is to extend classic intrusion detection techniques for typical wireless
mechanisms. In general, anomaly-based intrusion detection techniques are the most likely
to be widely applied to wireless networks because they can detect new and previously
unknown attacks. Anomaly detection is especially important in wireless networks
because they’re used with mobile nodes and in many different scenarios that have
different security policies. Anomaly detection typically uses data-mining techniques and
requires cooperation among all the nodes in the network, especially for traffic monitoring
and event correlation.
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7. CONCLUSION
Wi-Fi is a disruptive technology that came unexpectedly and has been growing
by leaps and bounds, mainly because it is inexpensive and fills a need..The vulnerabilities
in wireless systems tend to be numerous because of the inherent lack of physical
security.Despite all the security issues currently present, wireless networks are the future;
however, people will fear using them if they perceive a substantial threat to their privacy
or to sensitive information. It is the administrator's responsibility to make legitimate
clients feel safe and confident in the use of a service. Security can never be perfect,
especially in large networks, but reliance on mechanisms that are known to be broken is
lazy and carries the danger that one's supposedly secure network becomes a playground
for those who only know how to download the latest security breaking tool from the
web.As Wi-Fi grows up, it is getting better, more secure, and faster. Clearly, vendors and
the Wi-Fi Alliance have listened to the users' need for security.
Naturally, we advocate more research that ultimately builds robust and opaque
wireless channels—such features will help WiFi become a fundamental building block
for critical applications. Research is ongoing in the use of WiFi technology in industrial
environment.
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8. REFERENCES
 “Dependability in Wireless Networks:Can We Rely On WiFi?” IEEE Security &

Privacy,vol.5,no.1,January/February 2007,pp.23-29.
 IEEE 802.11 Wikipedia
 www.how stuffs work.com
 Vikram Gupta, Srikanth Krishnamurthy and Michalis Faloutsos, Denial of service

Attacks at the MAC Layer in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks.
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Wifi Technology 24072013111601 Wifi Technology

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www.SeminarsTopics.

A Technical Seminar Report On

DEPARTMENT OF COMPUTER SCIENCE & ENGINEERING

4. Vulnerabilities at the physical layer…………….……........12

5. Vulnerabilities at the Mac layer………………….….……15

Figure showing WiFi Zone

Wireless Fidelity is important to the wireless LAN world, because it is securely

To our knowledge, no current practical or theoretical framework handles WiFi

We present an overview of WiFi vulnerabilities and investigate their proximate

The OSI Layer

HOW DOES IT WORK?

The four components are:

1) High-speed access which is also known as broadband is an internet connection which

ADDING WI-FI TO A COMPUTER

higher speeds and good interoperability on 802.11b equipment.

 Install the card

 Install the drivers for the card

 Find an 802.11 hotspot

 Access the hotspot.

 Double-click on one of the hotspots to connect to it.

4. VULNERABILITIES AT THE PHY LAYER

WiFi uses a single narrow-band radio channel on a public frequency. Radio

The prologue of any content-eavesdropping attack is channel selection.

In general, today’s narrow-band radio technologies can’t hide communication. We

Radio transmission, can’t be confined in a restricted area, so WiFi relies on

Radio communications are subject to jamming, which is cheap and easy to do in a

 Locating mobile nodes

Wandering through a wireless world, an attacker can easily track MAC

Man-in-the-middle attacks are a traditional threat against access control

short-term impact on security is twofold: power-conservation features and their

5. VULNERABILITIES AT THE MAC LAYER

Anything that’s simple in a wired environment (such as network cables plugged

Vulnerabilities typically narrow the available bandwidth, and a narrow channel

That kind of functionality, Davidson says, opens up a wide variety of potential

property: In general, knowledge of exact locations can help prevent man-in-the-middle

 “Dependability in Wireless Networks:Can We Rely On WiFi?” IEEE Security &

 www.how stuffs work.com

 Vikram Gupta, Srikanth Krishnamurthy and Michalis Faloutsos, Denial of service

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