Practical Defense against WEP and WPA-PSK Attack for WLAN

WLAN is widely used since it provides a both convenient and flexible way of communication. However, it is more vulnerable to unauthorized access. So WEP and WPA are proposed to improve the security of WLAN as two popular standards. But they are not perfect. In this article we analyze their shortcomings and raise two mechanisms named d-WEP and d-WPA-PSK. The d-WEP adopts the frequency of ARP requests to AP as a standard to judge whether AP is attacked and prevents the client suspected to access by dropping the ARP requests from it. Next we theoretically analyze the feasibility and do some corresponding experiments based on the loadable module, netfilter and hostap functions of linux. The experimental results show d-WEP can effectively prevent the active attack against WEP which is consistent with the result of theoretical analysis. On the other hand, the d-WPA-PSK uses such a mechanism that the PSK is regularly replaced to prevent dictionary attacks. This method has been proven to be feasible in theory. So for wireless network security, our research will have great significance.