Concept of Deauthentication Attack

What is De-Authentication Attack?

• A de-authentication attack is a type of denial-of-service attack that targets communication between a user (or all users) and a wireless access point. This attack sends disassociate packets to one or more clients which are currently associated with a particular access point.
• The best thing about this attack is that attack still works where the network uses WPA2 encryption and you can deauth any device without even being a part of the network.

How Deauth works on WPA2 despite encryption?

• The IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) protocol does not encrypt the packet header frames. Therefore, the header frames can be easily spoofed and the attacker only needs to know the victim's MAC address, which is available in the clear through wireless network sniffing and can be successful in the attack.

What can be the reason to attack the network?

• Evil Twin Access Point: The attacker conducts a de-authentication attack on the target client, disconnecting it from its current network, thus allowing the client to automatically connect to the Evil twin access point. Which then can be used to capture network packets transferred between the client and the Rouge Access Point (RAP).
  
• Password Attacks: The attacker conducts a de-authentication attack on the target client, disconnecting it from its network and then tries to connect back i.e. sending WPA/WPA2 4-way handshake packets to the access point. The attacker sniffs and captures the handshake packet. These captured packets were later used to mount brute-force or dictionary attacks to guess or crack the password.
• Mess with others (Pranks): De authenticates a person from the network and lets the person feel that there is a problem with his/her device and lets them restart or troubleshoot their device several times.
• Kick someone out of the network just because that person is slowing down the internet speed.

How to perform a deauth attack?

Disconnects any client from any network.

• Works on encrypted networks (WEP, WPA, WPA2)
• No need to know the network key/password/passphrase.
• No need to connect to the network.

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