Survey of RTS-CTS Attacks in Wireless Network

DoS (Denial-of-Service) attack is used to make the requested users waiting for the machine or network resources. The attack mainly efforts to temporarily suspend services of a server connected to the Internet. Low Rate DoS attacks are new types of DoS attacks, which cannot be detected easily since the attacks are sent with the low volume. The different methods to handle the high rate DoS attack. But these methods cannot be used to grab or detect the low rate attacks. RTS/CTS attack is a new type of low rate DoS attacks. RTS/CTS (Request to Send / Clear to Send) mechanism is a reservation scheme used in the wireless networks. It is used to minimize frame collisions created due to the hidden node problem. The attacker nodes modify the duration field value of the RTS packets to reserve the channel for additional time. Since well-behaved nodes will respond to RTS with CTS, an attacker could exploit authenticated nodes to spend CTS with manipulated duration field value irrespective of the attack could do by itself. This results in the decrease of network performance and increase in transmission delay.