Hackers of India

Autoimmunity Disorder in Wireless LAN

 Jvr Murthy   Amit Vartak   Md Sohail Ahmad 

2008/08/09

Abstract

An autoimmune disorder is a condition that occurs when the immune system mistakenly attacks and destroys healthy body tissue. This presentation is about discovery of autoimmunity disorder in select open source and commercial 802.11 AP implementations. By sending specially crafted packets, it is possible to trigger autoimmunity disorder and cause AP to turn hostile against its own clients. Eight examples of autoimmune disorder will be demonstrated.

Autoimmunity disorder can be exploited to craft new DoS attacks. Although 802.11w promises immunity from DoS attacks, we show that autoimmunity disorder leaves a door open through which DoS attacks can still be launched. One example of DoS attack against MFP(11w) will be demonstrated.