Security Analysis of IEEE 802.16

This paper analyzes some critical security issues in the family of IEEE 802.16 standard that has not been addressed so far. In particular two of the key features of the standard, the dynamic resources allocation and the mesh mode revealed to be vulnerable to attacks that represent serious threats to the robustness and privacy of the communications. In the first case the attacker is able to reduce bandwidth assigned to its neighbors, with the aim of obtaining more resources for himself; in the second case, we observed that there might be no real privacy in communications between two nodes of the mesh network. These vulnerabilities are still present even after the latest amendment to the standard, IEEE 802.16e that solved some previously addressed security flaws.