A secure n-secret based client authentication protocol for 802.11 WLANs

Abstract

Authentication has strong impact on the overall security model of every information system. Various authentication techniques are available for restricting the access of unauthorized users to the enterprise scale networks. IEEE 802.1X defines a secure and reliable authentication framework for 802.11 WLANs, where Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) provides the base to this architecture. EAP is a generic architectural framework which supports extensibility by incorporating the new and improved authentication schemes, which are based on different types of credentials. Currently there exist a number of EAP and Non-EAP methods with varying level of security and complexity. In this work, we have designed a new n-secret based authentication scheme referred here as Personal Dialogue Based Authentication, for the client authentication to the network. It is a Transport Layer Security (TLS) protected authentication protocol, which will be executed inside the secure TLS tunnel for providing the privacy and credential security to the wireless client. The developed authentication protocol has a reasonable set of features like; strong security, user privacy, simplicity and extensibility. For the formal analysis of the protocol we have used SPAN–AVISAP model checker on Ubuntu platform for validating the realization of the specified security goals. The experimental results obtained by simulation performed with the Automated Validation of Internet Security Protocols and Applications (AVISPA) tool shows that our protocol is efficient and secured.