Detection of Fabricated CTS Packet Attacks in Wireless LANs

IEEE 802.11 standard employs the RTS/CTS handshake procedure to avoid transmission collision and to improve network throughput. However, such an exchange may become a system vulnerability when malicious nodes send fabricated control messages such as CTS to make false claims of channel reservation. To the best of our knowledge, there exists no systematic detection technique for such fabricated control messages. In this paper, we investigate the adverse effects of such attacks on channel throughput and delivery ratio. In order to mitigate these effects, we propose an approach to detect the fabricated messages. With the help of two-hop neighborhood information, our technique enables jamming detection and allows the targeted node to send a message, which instructs neighboring nodes to ignore the fabricated control message. We perform ns-2 simulations to evaluate the benefit of our scheme.

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