Revisiting WLAN frames
As this book deals with the security aspects of wireless, we will assume that you already have a basic understanding of the protocol and the packet headers. If not, or if it's been some time since you worked on wireless, this would be a good time to revisit this topic again.
Let's now quickly review some basic concepts of WLANs that most of you may already be aware of. In WLANs, communication happens over frames. A frame would have the following header structure:
The Frame Control field itself has a more complex structure:
The Type field defines three types of WLAN frame:
Management frames: Management frames are responsible for maintaining communication between access points and wireless clients. Management frames can have the following subtypes:
Authentication
Deauthentication
Association request
Association response
Reassociation request
Reassociation response
Disassociation
Beacon
Probe request
Probe response
Control frames: Control frames are responsible for ensuring a proper...
