Technical Literature Review and Seminar

On

“WIFI TECHNOLOGY”

Submitted

In partial fulfillment of the requirement for the award of the Degree of

BACHELOR OF TECHNOLOGY

In

ELECTRONICS & COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING

By

Y.SANDHYA
18315A0453

UNDER THE SUPERVISION OF

Mrs.T.SWAPNA

Assistant professor, E.C.E Department

Mr. T.SANDEEP

Assistant professor, E.C.E Department

DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRONICS & COMMUNICATION ENGINEERING

SREENIDHI INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY

(AUTONOMOUS)
Yamnampet, Ghatkesar, R.R District, Hyderabad – 501301(Affiliated to JNT University
Hyderabad, Hyderabad and Approved by AICTE - New Delhi)
 CERTIFICATE

Date:

This is to certify that the Seminar on Technology and Its Impact report entitled
" WIFI TECHNOLOGY " being submitted by Y.SANDHYA [18315A0453 ] in partial
fulfilment for the award of Bachelor of Technology degree in Electronics &
Communications Engineering to Sreenidhi Institute of Science and Technology,
Yamnampet, Ghatkesar [Telangana], is a report of review work carried out by his/her during
academic year 2018-2019 under our guidance and supervision.

Incharge,TLRS Co-incharge,TLRS

Mr. T.SWAPNA Mr.T.SANDEEP

Assistant Professor Assistant Professor

ECE Department ECE Department

Dr S.P.V SUBBA RAO

HOD

ECE Department
 INDEX

Contents Page no.

ABSTRACT
CHAPTER: 1
Introduction 1
CHAPTER: 2
Importance of Wi-Fi 2
CHAPTER: 3
Dependability 3-8
CHAPTER: 4
Vulnerabilities at the physical layer 9-14
Vulnerabilities at the Mac layer
CHAPTER: 5
Future 15
CHAPTER: 6
Conclusion 16
References 17
ABSTRACT
Technology is no longer judged by its technical brilliance, but by the
return on investment (both tangible and intangible). This in turn, is
dictated by the killer application for that technology. Wireless Networks
fit into this because the technology has been around long enough and
can provide enough benefits to be seriously considered for deployment.
At the enterprise, it provides communication support for mobile
computing. It overcomes and, in fact, annihilates the physical limitation
of wired networks in terms of adaptability to a variation in demand.
Network connectivity in a company’s meeting room is a classic example.
The number of users using that room would vary for different meetings
Mobility is another feature by wireless. Mobile users can be truly mobile,
in that hey don’t need to be bound to their seats when connecting to the
network. Mobility, however is not only associated with users, it’s also
associated with the infrastructure itself
This leads to other provision of wireless, that of scalability. It really helps
in extending your network. It also becomes important if an enterprise has
a rented office and needs to shift to a new place. Wi-Fi, or wireless
fidelity, is freedom: it allows you to connect to the internet from your
couch at home, a bed in a hotel room, or a conference room at work
without wires. It is a wireless technology like cell phones, Wi-Fi enabled
computers send and receive data indoors and outdoors; anywhere within
the range of the base station. And the best thing of all, Wi-Fi is fast. In
fact, it’s several times faster than the fastest cable modem connection.
 CHAPTER: 1 INTRODUCTION

Wi-Fi short for “wireless fidelity”—is the commercial name for the 802.11 products that
have flooded the corporate wireless local area network (WLAN) market and are becoming
rapidly ingrained in our daily lives via public hotspots and digital home networks. It is a
trademark of the Wi-Fi Alliance, founded in 1999 as Wireless Ethernet Compatibility
Alliance (WECA), comprising more than 300 companies, whose products are certified by the
Wi-Fi Alliance, based on the IEEE 802.11 standards (also called Wireless LAN (WLAN) and
Wi-Fi). Wi-fi is a wireless technology that uses radio frequency to transmit data through the
air.A Wi-Fi enabled device such as a PC game console, mobile phone, MP3 player or PDA
can connect to the Internet when within range of a wireless network connected to the Internet.
The coverage of one or more interconnected access points called a hotspot can comprise an
area as small as a single room with wireless-opaque walls.There are three types of wireless
technology, the 802.11b, the 802.11a, and the 802.11g. The first two are more commonly
used, compared to the last one. The difference of the first two is that the 802.11a is newer
compared to the other and is about five times faster than the 802.11b. The advantage of the
802.11g technology is that it is backwards compatible with both the 802.11a and the 802.11b
technology. And this is a big step forward in the wireless networking world.

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CHAPTER: 2 IMPORTANCE OF WIFI

WIFI gives you an extremely large amount of freedom because you can basically use
it from anywhere. From your couch to your local shopping mall, wireless fidelity can always
lend a helping hand. Also, WIFI is not restricted to certain groups. No matter who you are,
you can use it. And, on top of its convenience, WIFI is fast, reliable, and easy to use. In the
corporate enterprise, wireless LANs are usually implemented as the final link between the
existing wired network and a group of client computers. This gives these users wireless
access to the full resources and services of the corporate network across a building or campus
setting.

Wireless Fidelity is important to the wireless LAN world, because it is securely tested
to assure operability of equipment of the same frequency band and feature. WIFI is the
certification logo given by the WIFI Alliance for equipments that passes the tests for
compatibility for IEEE 802.11 standards. The WIFI Alliance organization, is a nonprofit
organization that promotes the acceptance of 802.11 wireless technology and they ensures all
WIFI certified 802.11 based wireless networking equipments works with all other WIFI
certified equipments of the same frequency. The WIFI Alliance works with technical-groups
like the IEEE and other companies that are developing new wireless networking equipments.

2
CHAPTER: 3 DEPENDABILITY

WiFi is becoming rapidly ingrained in our daily lives via public hotspots and digital home
networks. However, because a technology’s dependability requirements are proportional to its
pervasiveness, newer applications mandate a deeper understanding of how much we can rely on
WiFi and its security promises. Authentication and confidentiality are crucial issues for corporate
WiFi use, but privacy and availability tend to dominate pervasive usage. So far, WiFi hasn’t had the
best track record: researchers and hackers easily defeated its first security mechanism, Wired
Equivalent Privacy (WEP). Although the 802.11i standard addresses this failure and the larger issues
of confidentiality and authentication, no ongoing standardization effort handles WiFi availability, and
problems with robustness mean that a successful attack can block a network and its services, at least
for the attack’s duration. Another oft-neglected aspect of 802.11 networks is privacy—not payload
confidentiality but node activity monitoring. This kind of monitoring has value on its own (for
example, for contrasting user identification and location), but it also has a strong link to
dependability in attacks targeted at a specific node.

To our knowledge, no current practical or theoretical framework handles WiFi

dependability issues. Moreover, no previous work has analyzed WiFi security from this
viewpoint. Most research examines WiFi confidentiality and authentication by explaining the
problems related to native 802.11 security and showing how inadequate such mechanisms
are. The same effort hasn’t been put into analyzing a wireless network’s availability and
robustness: in fact, many denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against WLANs are known, but so
far only one research effort describes the actual implementation of two DoS attacks and
possible countermeasures.

We present an overview of WiFi vulnerabilities and investigate their proximate and

ultimate origins. The intended goal is to provide a foundation to discuss WiFi dependability
and its impact on current and future usage scenarios. Although a wireless network’s overall
security depends on the network stack to the application layer, this report focuses on specific
vulnerabilities at the physical (PHY) and data (MAC) layers of 802.11 networks.

3
 The OSI Layer

HOW DOES IT WORK?

Wireless Internet Access has four components that form its structure: high-speed access, a
networking gateway, a wireless network and a wireless customer. The customer connects
wirelessly through the wireless network to the gateway, it then launches their internet
browser, authenticates through the gate-way by entering a coupon code or purchasing time
and the user has high-speed internet.

4
The four components are:

1) High-speed access which is also known as broadband is an internet connection which is

generally faster than dial up service. Examples of high-speed internet access are ISDN, cable
modem, DSL, and also satellite services.

2) Network Gateway is between your high-speed access connection and the wireless network,
it acts like a gate. This gate will prevent people from accessing your wireless network unless
you know about it, the gateway also allows managing tools as well. These can include
authentication, network monitoring, and other services such as printing and voice over IP.

3) Wireless local area network is a system of connecting PC's and other devices within the
same physical proximity using high-frequency radio waves instead of wires. Wireless
networks work as long as your wireless ready device is within range.

4) Wireless customers are people who have a PC and a wireless adapter which means they
can access the internet wirelessly. The wireless adapter can be built in or it can be an external
device plugged into your computer.

ADDING WI-FI TO A COMPUTER

One of the best things about Wi-Fi is how simple it is. Many new laptops already come with
a Wi-Fi card built in -- in many cases you don't have to do anything to start using Wi-Fi. It is
also easy to add a Wi-Fi card to an older laptop or a desktop PC . Here's what you do:

 Buy a 802.11a, 802.11b or 802.11g network card. 802.11g has the advantage of higher
speeds and good interoperability on 802.11b equipment.

 For a laptop, this card will normally be a PCMCIA card that you slide into a PCMCIA
slot on your laptop. Or you can buy a small external adapter and plug it into a USB
port.

 For a desktop machine, you can buy a PCI card that you install inside the machine, or
a small external adapter that you connect to the computer with a USB cable.

 Install the card

 Install the drivers for the card

 Find an 802.11 hotspot

 Access the hotspot.

5
A hotspot is a connection point for a WiFi network. It is a small box that is hardwired into the
Internet . The box contains an 802.11 radio that can simultaneously talk to up to 100 or so
802.11 cards. There are many WiFi hotspots now available in public places like restaurants,
hotels, libraries and airports . You can also create your own hotspot in your home, as we will
see in a later section.

CONFIGURING WIFI
On the newest machines, an 802.11 card will automatically connect with an 802.11 hotspot
and a network connection will be established. As soon as you turn on your machine, it will
connect and you will be able to browse the Web, send email, etc. using WiFi. On older
machines you often have to go through this simple 3-step process to connect to a hotspot:

 Access the software for the 802.11 card -- normally there is an icon for the card down
in the system tray at the bottom right of the screen.

 Click the "Search button" in the software. The card will search for all of the available
hotspots in the area and show you a list.

 Double-click on one of the hotspots to connect to it.

On ancient 802.11 equipment, there is no automatic search feature. You have to find what is
known as the SSID of the hotspot (usually a short word of 10 characters or less) as well as the
channel number (an integer between 1 and 11) and type these two pieces of information in
manually. All the search feature is doing is grabbing these two pieces of information from the
radio signals generated by the hotspot and displaying them for you.

SECURITY

WiFi has had, and continues to have several security issues. In September of 1999 WEP
(Wired Equivalent Privacy) was the standard for wireless PC’s. WEP is used in the physical
and data link layers, and was designed to give wireless LANs the same security that wired
LANs had. WEP provided security by encrypting the data while it traveled from one end
point to the other. Unlike wired LANs who’s networks are usually inside of a building where
it’s protected wireless LANs are more vulnerable due to the fact that the data travels over
radio waves which are much easier to intercept. That is way too long for the key to be in use,
with that much time the key can get into the wrong hands, which could be disastrous for the
corporation.

6
In 2002 the wireless LANs security was upgraded when Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) was
introduced. WPA had several improvements like better encryption, and it also used the
RADIUS-based 802.1X, which authorizes the user to gain access to the ISP provider. Also
the setup for WPA was much simpler than the setup for WEP. WPA came in two types,
Enterprise which was used for corporations, and also Personal which was used for home
users.

In June of 2004 802.11i was completed and became the new and current standard for
Wi-Fi. 802.11i is also known as Wi-Fi Protected Access 2(WPA2). WPA and WPA2 have
several of the same qualities, but WPA2 upgraded its encryption of data with the Advanced
Encryption Standard (AES). There is a problem with AES however, and the problem is that
this could require hardware upgrades for many wireless LANs. WPA2 is compatible with
WPA products, and consumers can upgrade to WPA2 easily. However WPA2 is not
compatible with the original Wi-Fi standard WEP. Also like WPA, WPA2 has two versions,
WPA2 Enterprise is for corporations, and WPA2 Personal is for the home users.

Many corporations today use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to send and receive
important information. Virtual Private Networks use the internet to send and receive
information by creating a tunnel connecting the two end users. VPN encrypts the data to keep
any hackers from stealing the information while it is being sent. To use a VPN the two end
users must be using the same authentic protocol or it will not work. The authentic protocol
gives only certain users access to certain information.

There are several other ways to protect your wireless computer and the information
that is stored on it. One of the first things you should do is to change the default information
on your wireless router. The reason for this is that many hackers have gained access to the
default information from the different companies who create the wireless PC’s, which makes
it easier for them to get into your computer information. You should also have strong
passwords on your wireless computers to keep the hackers from getting into your sensitive
data. Another way to protect yourself is to download firewalls onto your computer. Firewalls
monitor, and restrict the traffic that comes in and out of your computer. Downloading anti-
virus software onto your computer is another way to protect your computer. You should
update your anti-virus software often, because within one month there are at least 10 to 50
new viruses, or worms that the anti-virus software is not capable of protecting your computer
against.

7
If you take your personal wireless computer out in public you should turn off your file
sharing.

Keeping your file sharing on is an easy way for hackers to get into your system. Also when
you are not on your computer, you should turn it off. This is the surest way to keep hackers
out of your computer files. They can’t get into the system if it’s not on. There are several
other ways that you can protect your sensitive data, but these are a few simple things that
everyone should do to protect themselves, and their data.

WI-FI-SECURITY
WiFi hotspots can be open or secure. If a hotspot is open, then anyone with a WiFi card can
access the hotspot. If it is secure, then the user needs to know a WEP key to connect.

WEP stands for Wired Equivalent Privacy, and it is an encryption system for the data that
802.11 sends through the air. WEP has two variations: 64-bit encryption (really 40-bit) and
128-bit encryption (really 104-bit). 40-bit encryption was the original standard but was found
to be easily broken. 128-bit encryption is more secure and is what most people use if they
enable WEP.

For a casual user, any hotspot that is using WEP is inaccessible unless you know the WEP
key.

The Wi-Fi Alliance recently announced Wi-Fi Direct, a new peer-to-peer protocol that will
enable direct connections between Wi-Fi client devices, allowing users to do everything from
syncing data between a smartphone and a laptop to displaying pictures on a flat screen
television or printing them on a wireless printer—all without requiring the user to join a
traditional Wi-Fi network.

The WFA intends to finalize the specification by the end of 2009, and to begin certifying
products in mid-2010. In the meantime, many chip manufacturers (and Wi-Fi Alliance
member companies) are offering their own pre-specification solutions, including Atheros
Direct Connect, Intel My WiFi Technology, and Marvell Mobile Hotspot—all of which
should be easily upgradeable to the final specification next year.

In fact, interoperability with legacy devices is a key benefit of the protocol: not only will Wi-
Fi Direct generally require just a simple software upgrade, but only one of the connecting
devices (not both) has to be certified to the new specification.

8
CHAPTER:4 VULNERABILITIES AT THE LAYER

4.1 VULNERABILITIES AT THE PHY LAYER

WiFi uses a single narrow-band radio channel on a public frequency. Radio
communications are typically multiplexed and based on some combination of space,
frequency, time, and coding—WiFi exploits the first three. Current WiFi networks rely on
two different basic coding techniques: the Direct Sequence Spread Spectrum (DSSS), which
11b and 11g devices use, and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM), which
11a and 11g devices use. Nodes on the same frequency share a single channel, which the
802.11 MAC layer serializes through random access and contention mechanisms. These
characteristics allow for several attacks, which we’ll discuss in more detail in the following
subsections

 Interception

It’s not surprising that an attacker can intercept a radio communication, but the
threat’s relevance clearly depends on the nature of the leaked information. Most
cryptographic protocols address content eavesdropping but pay little attention to privacy
issues. The 802.11 standard never uses mechanisms for preventing traffic analysis, so it’s
fairly easy to infer the number of “talking” nodes, their identities and who’s talking to whom.
This lets an attacker violate user privacy.

The prologue of any content-eavesdropping attack is channel selection. Unfortunately,

the limited number of channels and frequencies in WiFi devices make this step trivial—
moreover, any 802.11 device has built-in capabilities to scan and report activity on all
available channels.

In general, today’s narrow-band radio technologies can’t hide communication. We

must therefore accept that interception is easy, especially because radio coverage area can’t
be delimited precisely. Physical anti-interception techniques aren’t fit for common WiFi
usage scenarios.

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  Injection

Radio transmission, can’t be confined in a restricted area, so WiFi relies on logical

access control mechanisms for authorized access. However, this heavily limits the validity of
well-established security tools such as firewalls and network intrusion detection systems, so
authorized traffic is instead validated as it flows over the wireless link. In practice, though,
this activity constrains the upper network layers in their attempt to provide specific security
mechanisms. As a solution, the MAC level could provide data source authentication for every
transmitted frame by identifying the source as a specific node or as a member of a trusted
group.

 Jamming

Radio communications are subject to jamming, which is cheap and easy to do in a

narrow-band channel such as the one WiFi devices occupy. Jamming can make corporate
WLANs unavailable, which is certainly annoying, or even block a residential phone network
or hospital medical infrastructure, which is much scarier. The WiFi nodes themselves can
easily detect a jam because each station already monitors channel quality for AP and bit-rate
selection, but locating the actual attacker is a different story.

 Locating mobile nodes

Wandering through a wireless world, an attacker can easily track MAC addresses
and build a database that lists wireless nodes, their locations, and their movements, even for
wearable devices such as PDAs. Although a wireless node’s exact position might be hard to
get, it’s much easier to detect its presence in a large area. If the device is a personal one, this
could even help someone track the device owner’s location.

 Hijacking

Man-in-the-middle attacks are a traditional threat against access control solutions.

Although it’s easy for attackers to intercept wireless traffic and inject an attack, it isn’t trivial
to hijack a wireless channel.. An attacker can try to jam the receiver while still being able to
access the transmitted traffic—for example, by using directional antennas or a set of two
probes near the sender and the receiver.

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  Energy

Batteries are a key enabling factor for mobility in radio networks, but a limited
energy supply can easily become a perfect target for availability attacks. Although
breakthroughs in energy production technology will hopefully mitigate this problem, the
short-term impact on security is twofold: power-conservation features and their protection
become vital, and any security mechanism must be carefully evaluated against its energy
cost.

4.2VULNERABILITIES AT THE MAC LAYER

Although it inherits the underlying PHY layer’s insecurity, the 802.11 MAC layer adds
some peculiar weaknesses of its own. Its “dangerous” features are that it implements a shared
channel and must synchronize among different parties, making it much more complex than
Ethernet. These three broad categories leave the network open to several different
vulnerabilities.

 Shared channel

When many nodes use the same channel, their traffic must be distinguishable—
accordingly, 802.11 networks use a MAC address as a static station identifier.

11
A shared channel also implies a shared bandwidth, thus transmission speed lowers if several
nodes use it simultaneously.

The 802.11e standard deals with providing quality of service over WiFi networks via traffic
prioritization mechanisms, but these mechanisms rely fully on the existing MAC layer, its
rules, and, more important, its vulnerabilities. As such, the proposed quality-of-service
mechanisms don’t enforce availability.

 Synchronization

Anything that’s simple in a wired environment (such as network cables plugged into
wall sockets) must be emulated with special frames in the wireless world, which can lead to
problems when synchronizing state transitions between two or more entities. As in any
system in which two or more parties must remain synchronized to work, a successful
desynchronization forced by an attacker leads to a system malfunction.

 Upper levels

Applications that deal with personal information are extremely vulnerable to data
capture and disclosure. At first glance, home banking might seem to be the most sensitive
application, but most banks provide secure access through their SSL channels. The real issue
here is privacy—most services typically aren’t protected in the network stack’s upper layers
and carry information that attackers can use to profile and track potential victims.

Vulnerabilities typically narrow the available bandwidth, and a narrow channel incurs
delays that can hurt real-time services—as noted earlier, multimedia streams in particular are
very sensitive to delays in packet delivery because they directly affect quality of service.

 Lab experience

The analysis we’ve presented so far raises a key question: how real are the threats
we’ve outlined? To answer that question, we built some attack tools that exploit a few of the
vulnerabilities discussed here and tested them against a small WiFi network in our labs.

12
 All the attacks we tested use off-the-shelf hardware and open source device drivers,
and are fairly easy to do.Under some attack conditions, the target network was completely
blocked for the test’s whole duration. A packet capture engine could detect almost all the
attacks, and all of them introduced various anomalies in network behavior.

 MAC-level jamming

Our version of the jamming attack consisted of a special test mode already available
in the devices we used, which gave us continuous transmission regardless of MAC-level
access rules. This caused constant collisions with every other station in the cell, which was
then totally blocked. Because colliding stations back off and don’t transmit for some time.
The tests have shown that a 10 percent jamming period was enough to halt transmission in a
cell.The jamming effect spanned across three adjacent WiFi channels, but this attack didn’t
require packet injection techniques and thus was hardly detectable with a network-layer
intrusion detection system.

 Multimedia performance

By forging the appropriate frame, we could make AP believe that the victim was in
power-save mode so that it could start buffering traffic for it. This caused delays in traffic
delivery, which especially hurt our real-time traffic—in fact; we could stop a Real-Time
Protocol (RTP) flow with this attack. Of course, the victim’s precise behavior depends on the
power-save mode’s device driver implementation. But some drivers always react upon receipt
of the traffic information map (TIM is a part of every beacon frame and announces the
presence of buffered traffic) and tell the AP that they’re not in power-save mode, thus
mitigating the attack’s effects. Other drivers ignore the TIM if the station isn’t in power-save
mode and thus suffer the attack’s whole effects.

Potential applications

Andy Davidson, senior director of software engineering at Atheros, says Wi-Fi Direct is
ultimately about enabling connections on the fly. “If you’re sitting at home, obviously, you
have all your own devices connected to your access point—but if a guest comes over and has
a Wi-Fi phone, and wants to show you some pictures from it, it would be nice if they could
easily show the pictures on your TV,” he says.

13
That kind of functionality, Davidson says, opens up a wide variety of potential applications.

“Wi-Fi for wireless Internet access is obviously very popular, but to also be able to use it to
share files, to share photographs, to print documents…to be able to push a presentation to the
people you’re presenting to—all of these usages, I think, are just going to make Wi-Fi
technology all the more desirable,” he says.

Intel senior product manager Gary Martz says Wi-Fi Direct will drive a fundamental shift in
the way most people use Wi-Fi. “Wi-Fi Direct is the specification that’s going to take Wi-Fi
from just being a networking technology to being a mass market consumer technology for
connecting your devices…without ever having to know what an SSID is, or what WPA2
security is, or what Wi-Fi Protected Setup is,” he says.

Still, Martz says it will inevitably take some time for Wi-Fi Direct to reach the enterprise.
“Consumers are going to grow to love it, and then you’re going to see an evolution—just as
with a lot of new technologies in the corporate space—where it flows from the consumer to
small and medium businesses, and then the corporate IT manager puts some miles on it in
validation, and then they’ll start to roll it out,” he says.

Enterprise security

To that end, Martz says, the specification places a premium on security. “We developed Wi-
Fi Direct to have separate security domains, so your wireless LAN connection is a separate
security domain from your Wi-Fi Direct network,” he says. “And the corporate IT manager
can manage that crossover—does he want to allow that crossover, or does he want to firewall
it?”

The IT manager’s answer to that question, inevitably, depends upon the application. “In the
case of allowing a guest to the corporate environment to have access to a printer, those
security domains are going to be firewalled, so that he can securely provide print capabilities
to a visitor without compromising anything on his corporate wireless LAN,” Martz says.

14
CHAPTER: 5 FUTURE

Originally, Wi-Fi was just a hack so that people could connect a notebook to a
network via wireless using a spectrum that didn't have to be paid for. No one expected it to
grow so fast, and to become used so widely. The fact that it has spread like wildfire has
caused many kinds of technology companies, from wireless cell phone providers to network
hardware manufacturers, to rethink their businesses Thus far, we’ve made it clear that WiFi
isn’t ready for critical applications, mainly because of its intrinsic robustness problems. But
next-generation wireless networks need modern security features, and WiFi will have to
provide extensions and changes to maintain its supremacy among the various wireless data
technologies.

Jamming attacks have so far gone unstopped, and their effects are devastating.
Researchers have suggested various approaches to prevent them, but a recent approach to
detecting them is to monitor the channel and share what each node sees, to create a “global
view” of the network. Any approach that improves wireless networks’ anonymity could also
help with robustness: the traffic related to a specific node would be more difficult to select
and jam.

At the physical level, a new radio technology that can greatly help with robustness
problems is ultra wide band (UWB).UWB could potentially exploit its extreme large
bandwidth to hide communication channels by frequency hopping, which makes interception
harder and jamming at least more manifest.UWB offers a key security property: In general,
knowledge of exact locations can help prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, and inconsistencies
between a node’s actual position and the one the peer perceives can point out the presence of
an attacker in the middle. .

The main research issue is how to design a robust secure wireless channel, but this field lacks
both theoretical and practical literature. The general problem here is how to identify and
reject fake events at the MAC level.

15
 CHAPTER: 6 CONCLUSION

Wi-Fi is a disruptive technology that came unexpectedly and has been growing by
leaps and bounds, mainly because it is inexpensive and fills a need.The vulnerabilities in
wireless systems tend to be numerous because of the inherent lack of physical security
.Despite all the security issues currently present, wireless networks are the future; however,
people will fear using them if they perceive a substantial threat to their privacy or to sensitive
information. It is the administrator's responsibility to make legitimate clients feel safe and
confident in the use of a service.

Security can never be perfect, especially in large networks, but reliance on mechanisms that
are known to be broken is lazy and carries the danger that one's supposedly secure network
becomes a playground for those who only know how to download the latest security breaking
tool from the web.As Wi-Fi grows up, it is getting better, more secure, and faster. Clearly,
vendors and the Wi-Fi Alliance have listened to the users' need for security.

Naturally, we advocate more research that ultimately builds robust and opaque
wireless channels—such features will help WiFi become a fundamental building block for
critical applications. Research is ongoing in the use of WiFi technology in industrial
environment.

16
 REFERENCES

 “Dependability in Wireless Networks:Can We Rely On WiFi?” IEEE Security &

Privacy,vol.5,no.1,January/February 2007,pp.23-29.
 IEEE 802.11 Wikipedia
 www.how stuffs work.com
 Vikram Gupta, Srikanth Krishnamurthy and Michalis Faloutsos, Denial of service
Attacks at the MAC Layer in Wireless Ad Hoc Networks.

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