Abstract

Wireless networks have many potential applications. In many scenarios, Wireless networks are of interest to adversaries and they become susceptible to some types of attacks since they are deployed in open environments and have limited resources. One of the major attacks in wireless 802.11 WLANs is Denial of Service attack (DoS). To have a better understanding on DoS attacks, this article provides an overview on existing DoS attacks and major defence technologies in the Internet and wireless networks. In particular, we describe network based and host based DoS attack techniques to illustrate attack principles. DoS attacks are classified according to their major attack characteristics. Current counterattack technologies are also reviewed, including major defence products in deployment and representative defensive approaches in research. Finally, DoS attacks and defences in 802.11 based wireless networks are explored at physical, MAC and network layers. However, the purpose of describing the different types of attacks is to illustrate the different approaches and variations of DoS attacks in order to provide an overall recovery steps and best practice in networking to prevent high impact disaster against such attacks by ways of technology and legal framework

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