A mobile IP based WLAN security management framework with reconfigurable hardware acceleration

Abstract

The increasing use of wireless technologies in enterprise networks demands strong security management and policy enforcement mechanisms. The conventional security management frameworks used in wired LAN do not suit in wireless domain due to dynamic topology and mobility of hosts. The enforcement of organizational security policies in wireless LAN requires appropriate access control models as well as correct distribution of access control rules in the network access points. In this paper, we propose a WLAN security management framework supported by a spatio-temporal RBAC (STRBAC) model. The concept of mobile IP has been used to ensure a fixed layer 3 address of a mobile host. Each wireless policy zone consists of a Policy Zone Controller that coordinates with a dedicated Local Role Server to extract the low level access configurations corresponding to the zone access routers. The system can be mapped into a reconfigurable hardware to exploit the parallelism in computing. We also propose a formal STRBAC model to represent the global security policies formally and a SAT based decision procedure to verify the access configurations