Detection and Prevention Against RTS Attacks in Wireless LAN

TL;DR

This paper examines RTS attacks in WLANs, demonstrating their impact on network performance and proposing a mitigation technique to enhance security and efficiency.

Contribution

It introduces a novel mitigation method for RTS attacks in WLANs, improving network resilience against such denial-of-service threats.

Findings

RTS attacks significantly degrade WLAN performance

The proposed mitigation restores network throughput

Performance improvements are validated through analysis

Abstract

Widely deployed wireless network devices use a shared medium to communicate among mobile nodes. WLAN uses virtual carrier sensing mechanism to solve issues like hidden node problem, while this mechanism is vulnerable to DOS attacks e.g., RTS attack. This paper discusses RTS (Request to Send) attack where malicious nodes reserve the medium unnecessarily for overdue period of time. The effects of such attacks on performance of WLAN are observed, proposed a mitigation technique to restore network performance and analyzed the improvement in performance.