IEEE 802.11w-2009 is an approved amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard to increase the security of its management frames.
Protected management frames
Current 802.11 standard defines "frame" types for use in management and control of wireless links. IEEE 802.11w is the Protected Management Frames standard for the IEEE 802.11 family of standards. Task Group 'w' worked on improving the IEEE 802.11 Medium Access Control layer. Its objective was to increase security by providing data confidentiality of management frames, mechanisms that enable data integrity, data origin authenticity, and replay protection. These extensions interact with IEEE 802.11r and IEEE 802.11u.
Overview
Single and unified solution needed for all IEEE 802.11 Protection-capable Management Frames.
It uses the existing security mechanisms rather than creating new security scheme or new management frame format.
It is an optional feature in 802.11 and is required for 802.11 implementations that support TKIP or CCMP.
Its use is optional and can be negotiable between STAs.
It is infeasible/not possible to protect the frame sent before four-ways handshake because it is sent prior to key establishment. The management frames, which are sent after key establishment, can be protected. Infeasible to protect:
Beacon and probe request/response
Announcement traffic indication message
Authentication
Association request/response
Spectrum management action
Protected frames
Protection-capable management frames are those sent after key establishment that can be protected using existing protection key hierarchy in 802.11 and its amendments. Only TKIP/AES frames are protected and WEP/open frames are not protected. The following management frames can be protected:
Replay protection is provided by already existing mechanisms. Specifically, there is a counter for each transmitted frame; this is used as a nonce/initialization vector in cryptographic encapsulation/decapsulation, and the receiving station ensures that the received counter is increasing.
Usage
The 802.11w standard is implemented in Linux and BSD's as part of the 80211mac driver code base, which is used by several wireless driver interfaces; i.e., ath9k. The feature is easily enabled in most recent kernels and Linux OS's using these combinations. OpenWrt in particular provides an easy toggle as part of the base distribution. The feature has been implemented for the first time into Microsoftoperating systems in Windows 8. This has caused a number of compatibility issues particularly with wireless access points that are not compatible with the standard. Rolling back the wireless adapter driver to one from Windows 7 usually fixes the issue. Wireless LANs without this standard send system management information in unprotected frames, which makes them vulnerable. This standard protects against network disruption caused by malicious systems that forge disassociation requests that appear to be sent by valid equipment such as Evil Twin attacks.
