A mutual authentication and privacy mechanism for WLAN security

Abstract

AbstractIEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLAN) has been increasingly deployed in various locations because of the convenience of wireless communication and decreasing costs of the underlying technology. However, the existing security mechanisms in wireless communication are vulnerable to be attacked and seriously threat the data authentication and confidentiality. In this paper, we mainly focus on two issues. First, the vulnerabilities of security protocols specified in IEEE 802.11 and 802.1X standards are analyzed in detail. Second, a new mutual authentication and privacy scheme for WLAN is proposed to address these security issues. The proposed scheme improves the security mechanisms of IEEE 802.11 and 802.1X by providing a mandatory mutual authentication mechanism between mobile station and access point (AP) based on public key infrastructure (PKI), offering data integrity check and improving data confidentiality with symmetric cipher block chain (CBC) encryption. In addition, this scheme also provides some other new security mechanisms, such as dynamic session key negotiation and multicast key notification. Hence, with these new security mechanisms, it should be much more secure than the original security scheme. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.