Intrusion detection in infrastructure wireless LANs

The mobility of and ease of access and connectivity to wireless local area networks (WLANs) has appealed to both legitimate users and intruders. These attributes of WLANs leave open backdoors in the security mechanism that allow easy entrance to intruders and must, therefore, be addressed. This letter analyzes layer 2 security vulnerabilities that are a boon to intruders and discusses measures to counteract them, particularly in the widely used IEEE 802.11b WLAN implementation. Finally, the letter also discusses methodologies to detect an intrusion when a WLAN is operating in infrastructure mode. (C) 2004 Lucent Technologies Inc.