A Comparitive Analysis of Wireless Security Protocols (WEP And WPA2)

Computer networks have come a long way since their inception, and wireless networks are the new trend in the IT market. However, every new technology comes with several advantages and disadvantages. This paper addresses some of the key advances and some of the shortcomings of wireless networks security. It reviews various types of security levels currently offered by standard wireless networks, such as the wired equivalent privacy (WEP); the Wi-Fi protected access (WPA); and 802.11 - the latter defined as the ultimate security available for wireless networks to date. The paper also lists benefits of wireless networks and examples of cost savings. Corporations have been found to consider wireless installations based on the lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and return on investment (ROI) scenarios. In addition to general financial benefits, wireless networks have their own performance benefits such as, for example, increases in data accuracy, and increases in user productivity. There are few industries that have expanded their boundaries in the wireless arena: financial, educational institutions, healthcare facilities and airports (travel). With security being one of the major concerns irrespective of the industry type, the authors highlight factors that senior and mid level IT management should consider when implementing wireless networks. The success story of General Motors investment in wireless LANs factories presents a best practice for WLANs implementations. In the conclusions, questions still open and opportunities for future research are discussed.

CHAPTER 1 - 802.11 Wireless – Infrastructure Attacks

In this paper, we present dynamic rekeying with key hopping (DRKH) encryption protocol that uses RC4 encryption technique to ensure a strong security level with the advantage of low execution cost compared to other IEEE 802.11 security schemes. Low computational complexity makes DRKH suitable for solar- and battery-powered handheld devices such as nodes in Solar ESS (extended service set) and wireless sensor networks. Our design goal is to eventually integrate DRKH with different emerging wireless technologies. However, in this paper, we focus on the integration of DRKH with 802.11 standard since it is the most widely deployed wireless technology. The results and analysis show that DRKH overcomes all the security threats with wired equivalent privacy (WEP) protocol while consuming a much lower power than WEP, Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) 1.0 and WPA 2.0

The IEEE 802.11 wireless networks are organized either in infrastructure mode or ad-hoc mode. These wireless networks are very common, because of their portability and ease of access. In infrastructure mode of wireless networks, wireless clients have to be aware of the environments due to vulnerability and various types of attacks that can made by wireless intruders. Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) security protocols are used to protect any wireless infrastructure against wireless intruders. The main problem of wireless network is to maintain the network security. Firewalls are not much capable to secure network from attacks because firewall can only detect the attacks which come from outside of the network. Therefore, Intrusion Detection System (IDS) plays an important role in network security. In general Intrusion Detection System (IDS) is used to detect unauthorized access, malicious access point and various types of wireless attacks in IEEE 802.11 infrastructure mode of wireless networks. Network based Wireless Intrusion Detection system (WIDS) is designed to detect Denial of Service (DOS) attack and Malicious Access Point (Evil Twin Attack) in Wi-Fi networks. Because DOS attack and Evil Twin Attack are the most significant attacks in IEEE 802.11 networks. In this work, a diverse detection algorithm is proposed to detect DOS attack and Evil Twin Attack which is based on number of deauthentication frames and beacon frames and some other fields. In this project, an experimental setup for wireless network infrastructure with one access point (AP) and three or four number of wireless clients are used to design Wireless Intrusion Detection System (WIDS). In that design, one client act as an attacker and another one client act as detector. In this work, Kali Linux based attack software tool is used to register wireless clients to launch attacks on the network. The set of commends are used to configure on the designed infrastructure wireless networks for testing the attacks and solutions

The 802.11 standard defines the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and encapsulation of data frames. It is intended to provide data privacy to the level of a wired network. WEP suffered threat of attacks from hackers owing to certain security shortcomings in the WEP protocol. Lately, many new protocols like WiFi Protected Access (WPA), WPA2, Robust Secure Network (RSN) and 802.11i have come into being, yet their implementation is fairly limited. Despite its shortcomings one cannot undermine the importance of WEP as it still remains the most widely used system and we chose to address certain security issues and propose some modifications to make it more secure. In this thesis we have proposed a modification to the existing WEP protocol to make it more secure. We achieve Message Privacy by ensuring that the encryption is not breached. The idea is to update the shared secret key frequently based on factors like network traffic and number of transmitted frames. We also develop an Initialization Vector (IV) avoidance algorithm that eliminates IV collision problem. The idea is to partition the IV bits among different wireless hosts in a predetermined manner unique to every node. We can use all possible 2

The Internet has penetrated all aspects of human society and has promoted social progress. Cyber-crimes in many forms are commonplace and are dangerous to society and national security. Cybersecurity has become a major concern for citizens and governments. The Internet functions and software applications play a vital role in cybersecurity research and practice. Most of the cyber-attacks are based on exploits in system or application software. It is of utmost urgency to investigate software security problems. The demand for Wi-Fi applications is proliferating but the security problem is growing, requiring an optimal solution from researchers. To overcome the shortcomings of the wired equivalent privacy (WEP) algorithm, the existing literature proposed security schemes for Wi-Fi protected access (WPA)/WPA2. However, in practical applications, the WPA/WPA2 scheme still has some weaknesses that attackers exploit. To destroy a WPA/WPA2 security, it is necessary to get a PSK pre-shared key in pre-shared key mode, or an MSK master session key in the authentication mode. Brute-force cracking attacks can get a phase-shift keying (PSK) or a minimum shift keying (MSK). In real-world applications, many wireless local area networks (LANs) use the pre-shared key mode. Therefore, brute-force cracking of WPA/WPA2-PSK is important in that context. This article proposes a new mechanism to crack the Wi-Fi password using a graphical processing unit (GPU) and enhances the efficiency through parallel computing of multiple GPU chips. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is effective and provides a procedure to enhance the security of Wi-Fi networks.

10 - WLAN Risk and Threat Mitigation

Wi-Fi is the standard protocol for wireless networks used extensively in US critical infrastructures. Since the Wired Equivalency Privacy (WEP) security protocol was broken, the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) protocol has been considered the secure alternative compatible with hardware developed for WEP. However, in November 2008, researchers developed an attack on WPA, allowing forgery of Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) packets. Subsequent enhancements have enabled ARP poisoning, cryptosystem denial of service, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Open source systems and methods (OSSM) have long been used to secure networks against such attacks. This article reviews OSSMs and the results of experimental attacks on WPA. These experiments re-created current attacks in a laboratory setting, recording both wired and wireless traffic. The article discusses methods of intrusion detection and prevention in the context of cyberphysical protection of critical Internet infrastructure. The basis for this research is a specialized (and undoubtedly incomplete) taxonomy of Wi-Fi attacks and their adaptations to existing countermeasures and protocol revisions. Ultimately, this article aims to provide a clearer picture of how and why wireless protection protocols and encryption must achieve a more scientific basis for detecting and preventing such attacks.

One of the most important types that used to transfer data between nodes without using wires is a “wireless communication network”, where the transmission of data is censored remotely by using electromagnetic waves such as radio waves that usually implemented in the physical layer of the network. Continuous improvements in wireless network technology have reduced the security and speed differences between types of networks (wired and wireless), but in turn, increased security threats to wirelessly transmitted data. Wireless networks are weak in terms of "privacy protection" because anyone who is within the coverage area of a wireless network can attempt to break into that network. Hacking incidents have been reported frequently in places with shared free networks, and it has been observed that the places of open distributed networks of the Internet are most at risk of complete penetration of your phone or PC data. To solve this problem, several programs have been developed that provide protection for wireless networks that differ in terms of security. Some of them did not provide sufficient protection for wireless networks, such as Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP), and others made progress in preventing intrusions compared to their predecessors, such as Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA).

The COVID-19 pandemic and remote working did not improve WLAN security

The worldwide adoption of the IEEE 802.11 standard as the solution to provide efficient network coverage with high data-rates raised several security concerns. In a first stage, Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) was used to protect wireless networks from intrusions, whose main motivations ranged from simply getting free Internet access to the perpetration of complex attacks in order to retrieve confidential information. However, due to its multiple technical flaws, this approach was not sufficient, leading to the emergence of the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and WPA2 technologies, which provided more secure mechanisms at the cost of requiring complicated configuration tasks. In order to create a simple configuration interface, the Wi-Fi Alliance proposed a simple configuration approach: the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), which is used by major network products manufacturers and provides a much easier configuration setup, although in a less efficient security environment. Actually, this implementation is vulnerable to brute force attacks, which are very quick to execute, have little complexity and are difficult to detect. After cracking WPS, attackers can access to WPA/WPA2 login information and illicitly connect to the target wireless network. There are several technical requirements and legal constrains that limit access to the contents of wireless frames, thus preventing their deep analysis. This paper presents a method to detect attacks over WPA-enabled routers with Wi-Fi Protected Setup based only on the amount of generated traffic. The detection methodology uses a monitoring station that exclusively analyzes traffic flows from the router: by monitoring traffic and using a multiscale analysis procedure, the approach is able to accurately identify each intrusion attempt. Keywords: Traffic identification, wavelet transform, scalogram, Wi-Fi, WPS.Traffic identification, wavelet transform, scalogram, Wi-Fi, WPS.Traffic identification, wavelet transform, scalogram, Wi-Fi, WPS.

Wireless network security protocols are essential for enhancing security, privacy and confidentiality. However, network security protocols also require network resources in other to carry out authentication of users through the use of encryption keys and packet encryption. It is therefore relevant to investigate the effects of the amount of resources used by recommended wireless network security protocols in other to determine if user quality of experience and user quality of service is affected by the implementation wireless network security protocols. Our research investigates and examines the effect of security protocols on wireless network performance. The Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 - PreShared Key (WPA2-PSK) was used as the security protocol in focus while throughput was the network performance feature that was analyzed. Experiments were carried out which showed that throughput in a non-secured Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) is a bit higher than throughput in a secured WLAN. Our research contributes to the future development of WLAN protocols with low network resource consumption in other to contribute to improved network performance.

Chapter 7 - WLAN Security Considerations

The wireless local area network commonly uses WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption technology. Although it has encryption mechanism, but the WEP encryption mechanism has serious structural design deficiencies. In this article, we focus on the IEEE 802.11, hacker attack methods and WEP wireless networks to carry out instructions. Furthermore, the DoS / DDoS attacks also have become the most serious network security problems. Therefore, we use NS2 simulation to analyze the DoS / DDoS attacks and actual test common hacker using a wireless network to hacking, cracking WEP in actual operation.

Wireless local area network (WLAN) has changed the paradigm of communication and become ubiquitous. As the number of devices connected to wireless is increasing, it is therefore, essential to find vulnerabilities in the security of wireless networks. In this research WLAN security vulnerabilities are exposed in real time. WLAN security techniques (MAC filtering, Hidden SSID and WPA2) available to residential users were practically exploited. Tenda WiFi wireless access point was set up with MAC filtering, hidden SSID and WPA2 security mechanisms in different combinations in such a way as to add an additional layer of security to previous configuration. Kali Linux version 2017.1 was used as a platform to exploit WLAN networks in real time. In this research, the sensitive information broadcasted by WLAN was utilized to carry out attacks on wireless networks. A practical demonstration of exposing vulnerabilities in MAC filtering, Hidden SSID with MAC filtering and WPA2-PSK with hidden SSID and MAC filtering security mechanisms of AP was carried out in real time. It was observed that the existing security mechanisms were vulnerable. Researchers have exploited many security mechanisms of WLAN focusing upon a single parameter of WLAN security at a time. However, in this work, the three available security mechanisms were cascaded to produce a three layer security mechanism i.e. WPA2 with hidden SSID and MAC filtering. This cascaded model was exploited in real time.