WiFi (DoS) Disclaimer

Danger - Important

Warning - Recommendations

Denial of service attacks tend to be some of the more dangerous techniques to practice or try to get hands on experience with. It is very easy to fat finger a mac address and take down a device that you do not have lawful permission to test against. For this reason, unless you are an adequately trained professional and adequately equipped to negate any potential inadvertent risks, it is advised to not attempt these techniques (even in a lab environment).

Warning - Inadvertent Outages

This technique can cause outages for any nearby WiFi-enabled devices. It is strongly advised to not attempt this technique unless you are adequately trained and equipped to do so safely and be in compliance with local laws and regulations.

Warning - Regarding Legality

Performing this technique may not be in compliance with relevant laws and regulation. Please ensure that you confirm that any experiments or exercises are done within the bounds of the laws and regulations that apply to your location.

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Description

Quote - HackTricks

Sends beacon frames to show fake APs at clients. This can sometimes crash network scanners and even drivers!

HackTricks - Pentesting WiFi

Usage / Instructions

Requirements

  • WiFi card capable of entering monitor mode
  • Aircrack tool suite installed
  • mdk4 tool installed
  • Legal authorization to perform technique against or within range of other WiFi-enabled devices and access points.

Example - Beacon flooding with mdk4

mdk4 wlan0mon b -a -w nta -m
  • -a Use also non-printable caracters in generated SSIDs and create SSIDs that break the 32-byte limit
  • -w n (create Open)
  • -w t (Create WPA/TKIP)
  • -w a (Create WPA2/AES)
  • -m use real BSSIDS note: All the parameters are optional and you could load ESSIDs from a file.

    Source: HackTricks - Pentesting WiFi Tool: GitHub - aircrack-ng/mdk4

Further Reading / Resources

See Also - Relevant Whitepaper

Interesting whitepaper discussing the detection of beacon flooding attacks

ResearchGate - Beacon Frame Spoofing Attack Detection in IEEE 802.11 Networks

Operational Security / Red Teaming Information

Loudness (0-5)Detectability (0-5)Unintentional DoS likelihood (0-5)
5 (loud)5 (Very Detectable)4 (Likely)

Labs / Practice

  • None / TBA

Danger - Using this technique can cause outages to any WiFi enabled devices that are within range. For that reason, I did not attempt to lab this technique. One idea that I had for how to lab this safely would be to create a Faraday cage (grounded metal box) and put the lab devices inside of it for the test. Although, I do not have experience with building or using Faraday cages, thus I aired on the side of caution and skipped experimenting this technique all together. Unless you are competent and equipped to know of and take the proper measures to ensure that no outages occur for nearby devices, I would recommend skipping the lab portion of this technique.