A MAC Layer Based Defense Architecture for Reduction of Quality (RoQ) Attacks in Wireless LAN

Abstract: Recently an alternative of DDoS attacks called shrew attacks or Reduction of Quality (RoQ) has been identified which is very much difficult to detect. The RoQ attacks can use source and destination IP address spoofing, and they do not have distinct periodicity, and may not filter the attack packets precisely. In this paper, we propose to design the MAC layer based defense architecture for RoQ attacks in Wireless LAN which includes the detection and response stages. The attackers are detected by checking the RTS CTS packets from the MAC layer and the corresponding attack flows are blocked or rejected. By our simulation results, we show that our proposed technique achieves reduces the attack throughput there by increasing the received bandwidth and reducing the packet loss of legitimate users.