Detection of malicious parameter configurations in 802.11e EDCA
Pablo Serrano, Albert Banchs, Jose Felix Kukielka · GLOBECOM '05. IEEE Global Telecommunications Conference, 2005. · 2005
The service quality experienced by a user with the EDCA mechanism of the upcoming 802.11e standard depends on a number of configurable parameters, namely CWmin, CWmax, AIFS and TXOP_limit. WLAN stations are supposed to use the parameter configurations that the access point (AP) of the WLAN distributes with the beacon frames. However, a user can maliciously configure the parameters of his WLAN station in order to obtain a better service. In this paper, we address the issue of detecting malicious parameter configurations of EDCA. The AIFS and TXOP_limit parameters are relatively easy to control because of their deterministic nature. Given the capture effect, the CWmaxparameter may be unused by some users. Therefore, the key challenge lies in detecting if the CWminparameter of a station is well configured. The main contribution of this paper is the proposal of an algorithm to detect malicious CWminconfigurations. We show that, for an optimally configured WLAN, our algorithm is effective in avoiding that a user can substantially benefit from maliciously configuring his WLAN station without being detected