Exploiting Race Condition for Wi-Fi Denial of Service Attacks
Karim Lounis, Mohammad Zulkernine · 2020
Wi-Fi is a wireless communication technology that has been around since the late nineties. Nowadays, it is the most adopted wireless technology in various IoT (Internet of Things) applications. Although Wi-Fi security has significantly improved throughout the past years, it is still lagging behind. Many vulnerabilities exist allowing attackers to generate different types of attacks. These attacks can breach the authentication, confidentiality, and data integrity of Wi-Fi networks. In terms of attack impact, attacks on availability have a higher impact. In fact, breaching nowadays systems does not only result in data corruption but may also result in the loss of human lives. Therefore, more consideration should be brought to attacks on availability. In this paper, we present three attacks on Wi-Fi availability. These attacks cause a denial of service on Wi-Fi users by preventing them from connecting to a legitimate network. We adopt the evil twin scheme and exploit a race condition-based vulnerability to generate the attacks. Also, we propose countermeasures to fix the exploited vulnerability and mitigate the attacks.