Defeating 802.11 Wireless Networks

Abstract

Homeland Security of the United States is constantly under threat of attack from terrorist organizations. A variable and current terrorist threat is the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as weapons of mass destruction. These UAVs can be built simply and cheaply from commercial off the shelf (COTS) parts and are typically controlled using standard radio control (RC) technology. An emerging technology that is being implemented to control and communicate with UAVs is the 802.11 wireless network protocol or Wi-Fi. This project discusses various portions of the Wi-Fi protocol and analyzes the protocol to determine techniques for first detecting and then defeating wireless networks utilizing the protocol through denial or deception. The first set of techniques presented defeats a network through denial. These denial techniques are divided into two categories: broad area denial techniques and specific network denial techniques. After denial techniques are discussed a process for decieving an 802.11 wireless network is presented.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Jun 01, 2008
Accession Number
ADA487251

Entities

People

  • Charles R. Cosnowski

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Cyber
  • Energy and Power Technologies
  • Materials and Manufacturing Processes
  • Space

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Air Force
  • Aircrafts
  • Computer Access Control
  • Computer Communications
  • Computer Networks
  • Data Links
  • Electronic Mail
  • Local Area Networks
  • Multiple Access
  • Network Architecture
  • Network Protocols
  • Security Protocols
  • Transport Protocols
  • United States
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
  • Wireless Computer Networks
  • Wireless Networks

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Cybersecurity.
  • Maritime Combat Support and Expeditionary Logistics.
  • Radio communications and signal processing.

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - UAVs