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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

WEP KEY sizes WEP provided two Key Lengths for encryption – 40 bit WEP Key – 104 bit WEP Key An Initialization vector (IV) of length 24 bits was added to these key lengths to make the WEP keys as 64 bit/ 128 bit keys. Initialization vector (IV): As is seen from the above, the […]

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 […]

A Master device (Access point /P2P GO device) also needs to contend for the medium as any regular 802.11 station connected to the BSS. There are instances when the Beacon transmission might be delayed due to a delay in obtaining channel access. The connected stations need to wait till a beacon is received by them […]