Beacon Spoofing Attack: Impact and Security in Wireless Mesh Networks

Abstract

Wireless Mesh Networks have become an inevitable choice for gaining network access as it offers ubiquitous connectivity and improved performance due to the flexibility, scalability, features that it provides. Along with all these functionalities come the threats and vulnerabilities especially due to the fact that in case of wireless mesh networks the mesh points and mesh access points are deployed at different locations and are connected through a wireless medium to the portal. This radio communication between the mesh entities may even be heard by the attacker. The attacker may spoofs and masquerades the unencrypted management frames, thus facilitating the launch of Denial of service attacks. Moreover different mesh points communicate with each other via the forwarding action that too is based on radio communication. So the mesh devices are also vulnerable to physical tamper besides all other kinds of attacks. There is imperative need for the techniques that may thwart all kinds of security attacks. In this paper we have analyzed the impact of the beacon spoofing attack and flooding attack over the Wireless Mesh Networks test bed and proposed a security algorithm to detect this attack.