AIS300 - Scheme of Work - Scholarly Commons Home

2.5.1.4 Man in the middle attack
This man in the middle attack is achieved by inserting a malicious station in between
the wireless node and the access point. By doing this, the attacker act as the man in the
middle, impersonating the real AP to the node, and at the same time impersonating the
real node to the AP (Maple, Jacobs, & Reeve, 2006). Man in the middle is a real-time
attacks which occurs during a target device’s session (Welch & Lathrop, 2003). The
attacker passively monitors (passive attack) the packets sent between the station and the
AP during the first association process using an 802.11 network analyzer. Information
gathered through the network analyzer is enough to set up a rogue malicious station or
AP between the real node and the AP to mimic the real device (Curran & Smyth, 2005).
Once the attacker has successfully mimicked the real AP or the node, it can log every
packet; it can modify the traffic and selectively forward or delete it completely. The
attacker can also gain access and roam the network as a legitimate user (Curran &
Smyth, 2005). The rogue access concept will be explained further in the next section.
2.5.1.5 Rogue Access Point
As explained previously, the man in the middle attack is achieved by setting up a rogue
station between the targeted AP and node. Rogue access point are set up using the real
MAC address and SSID of a valid AP (Woodward, 2005). This is a technical security
issue since rogue station is an unauthorized imitation of the real AP and can connect to
the WLANs (Lim, Schmoyer, Levine, & Owen, 2003). Without proper security
procedures in place, an intruder can plant an unauthorized AP to the WLANs and use it
as a medium to collect information such as nodes’ login names and password (Lim,
Schmoyer, Levine, & Owen, 2003; Zahur, 2004). Curran and Smyth (2005) conduct a
real life attack on WLANs in their lab to show how easily rogue access can be created
and manipulated. Rogue access point could also be created unintentionally by users
since most consumer grade AP are configured user friendly and come with the security
features turned off therefore allow everyone to access the network (Hole, Dyrnes, &
Thorsheim, 2005). Rogue access is a great threat to the wireless network especially in
business since the impact is on the sensitive corporate data.
2.5.2 Other Security Issues
This section will look into the security issues concerning WLANs from technical and
social perspective. The first WLANs security issue that is often overlooked by users is
the hardware’s default configuration (Park & Dicoi, 2003). Park and Dicoi (2003)
16