Management Frame Protection – Understanding BIP – Part 2

The Interested Reader can look at an overview of Management Frame Protection here <Management Frame Protection> The first Part of this series for BIP is present here <Management Frame Protection – Understanding BIP – Part 1> BIP Transmission The following steps are taken to compute the MIC value for transmission. The standard defines the steps […]

Security Association (SA) Teardown Protection – Part 2

The interested Reader can look at Part 1 of the series here <Security Association (SA) Teardown Protection – Part 1> The different scenarios for SA security Teardown Protection and the message handling at that instance is provided below Scenario 1 – AP receives an association request from an Associated client – non-attack scenario The First […]

Security Association (SA) Teardown Protection – Part 1

802.11w also introduced an association spoofing protection mechanism. It was to prevent replay attacks from tearing down an existing client association. It consists of two mechanisms – 1) Association comeback time 2) SA-Query Procedure Association comeback time When an Access Point (AP) receives an association request from a Client which has an existing association table […]

TKIP Encryption Mechanism

The TKIP encryption protocol was introduced to rectify the fallacies seen with WEP encryption till a time when a more secure encryption mechanism was developed (AES). Hence, the networks that supported TKIP became a Transition Stationary Network. The TKIP algorithm applied the below modifications to the existing WEP algorithm to address the WEP vulnerabilities The […]

Pre-Authentication Mechanism in WLAN

Preauthentication allows a station to perform RSN authentication with an Access Point it is currently not associated to while associated to a different Access Point. This allows the station to move to a different Access point faster when the station has to roam and prevents the Data port being blocked on account of authentication during […]

Wireless Capture Example – EAP Handshake – Part 3

The reader can understand the association mechanism between a WLAN station and Access point for 802.1X authentication here — <Wireless Capture Example – EAP Handshake – Part 1> and the EAP exchange mechanism in 802.1X here — <Wireless Capture Example – EAP Handshake – Part 2>. The final phase of the 802.1X authentication mechanism is […]

Management Frame Protection – IGTK

The interested reader can look at an overview of Management Frame Protection in the following article<Management Frame Protection> The 802.11w amendment provided a new key termed IGTK – Integrity Group Temporal Key. The IGTK would be used for integrity check of broadcast/multicast management frames and is used to compute the MIC for Broadcast/multicast frames. The […]

WLAN Open System Authentication

The WLAN Open System authentication as the name suggests does not perform any authentication of the WLAN station desirous of joining the network. The WLAN client device will send an 802.11 authentication request frame and the Access point will respond with an 802.11 authentication response frame with a success code (0x0). The below packet captures […]

Beacon Transmission in IBSS Mode

Beacon transmission in an IBSS network is slightly different. In an IBSS network – each station connected to the IBSS network competes to transmit the beacon at beacon interval time. At the start of each beacon period – there is a beacon generation window consisting of a number of slots. If the window is 0 […]