Security improvements of IEEE 802.11i 4-way handshake scheme

One of the key components of IEEE 802.11i authentication protocol to defend against various malicious attacks is its 4-way handshake scheme. However, since Message 1 in the handshake scheme has not been protected by the Message Integrity Code (MIC), the original 4-way handshake scheme specified by the IEEE standard is vulnerable to the Denial of Service (DoS) attacks and DoS flooding attacks. Several countermeasures have been proposed in the literatures to prevent these attacks. However, they have ignored the feasibility of the solutions and the performance of them against the DoS flooding attacks. Motivated by these, in this paper, two security schemes, namely Message 1 Authentication and Supplicant Active Protection are proposed to protect wireless LAN networks free from the DoS attacks. Based on the analysis and formal verification by Colored Petri Nets (CPN), our proposed schemes could provide stronger secure functionality and outperform the existing schemes in the scenario under the Message 1 flooding attacks.