Research Of WLAN Intrusion Detection Technology

The Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) has been widely used because of its flexibility, economy and high performance. But the security of WLAN is always being threatened by various forms of intrusions because of its inherent openness and the vulnerabilities of the IEEE 802.11 protocols.The Intrusion Detection System (IDS) can detect the network data without affecting the network. The IDS can provide a real-time protection against the internal attacks, external attacks and operational mistakes. As the special nature of WLAN, the traditional IDS does not work well in WLAN. The traditional IDS can not effectively detect the intrusions against WLAN and the IEEE 802.11 link layer protocols.In order to protect the WLAN, this paper designs a wireless intrusion detection system based on the study of intrusion detection technology. Through researching the IEEE 802.11 WLAN and its security mechanism, the paper analyses WLAN security and wireless attacks detailedly. After that, this paper picks up the characters of the wireless attacks. The protocol analysis method and the traditional pattern-matching technology are combined to detect the wireless intrusions. First, analyse the IEEE 802.11 protocol. After that, detect the characters using the pattern-matching method and the variables analyzed. At last, analyse various anomalies of the link layer using the method of statistical analysis and abnormal behavior analysis. The wireless IDS designed can detect intrusions roundly.The testing results show that the wireless IDS designed can effectively detect most known WLAN threats and some unknown threats, such as denial of service attacks, forgery types of attacks, etc. The wireless IDS can improve the wireless LAN security.