Summary

Unfortunately, none of the original security mechanisms in IEEE 802.11 wireless local networks were robust. Adversaries easily bypass both the access control mechanisms and the shared-key authentication mechanism. Serious flaws in the WEP encapsulation process allow recovery of the secret encryption key and the malicious modification and replay of WEP-protected datagrams. Each of these problems alone poses a significant threat to deployed wireless networks together, they make exploiting wireless networks easy.

Fortunately, both WPA and RSN prevent the confidentiality, integrity, and access control attacks (see Chapter 7). Unfortunately, however, neither WPA nor RSN prevents denial-of-service attacks using forged management frames. The topic was hotly debated during several TGi meetings, and the consensus of the task group, not necessarily the authors, was that DoS attacks are a fact of life in wireless networking and that protecting the management frames would create downward compatibility problems.