Research Article
Partial Deafness: A Novel Denial-of-Service Attack in 802.11 Networks
@INPROCEEDINGS{10.1007/978-3-642-16161-2_14, author={Jihyuk Choi and Jerry Chiang and Dongho Kim and Yih-Chun Hu}, title={Partial Deafness: A Novel Denial-of-Service Attack in 802.11 Networks}, proceedings={Security and Privacy in Communication Networks. 6th Iternational ICST Conference, SecureComm 2010, Singapore, September 7-9, 2010. Proceedings}, proceedings_a={SECURECOMM}, year={2012}, month={5}, keywords={IEEE 802.11 DCF MAC retransmission Rate adaptation Denial of service attack}, doi={10.1007/978-3-642-16161-2_14} }- Jihyuk Choi
Jerry Chiang
Dongho Kim
Yih-Chun Hu
Year: 2012
Partial Deafness: A Novel Denial-of-Service Attack in 802.11 Networks
SECURECOMM
Springer
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-16161-2_14
Abstract
We present a new denial-of-service attack against 802.11 wireless networks. Our attack exploits previously discovered performance degradation in networks with substantial rate diversity. In our attack, the attacker artificially reduces his link quality by not acknowledging receptions (which we call “partial deafness” because an attacker pretends to have not heard some of the transmission), thereby exploiting the retransmission and rate adaptation mechanisms to reduce Medium Access Control (MAC)-layer performance. As compared to previously proposed attacks, the partial deafness attack is particularly strong because the attacker does not necessarily need any advantage over normal users in terms of transmission power, computation resources, or channel condition.
