Fuzzy based dynamic WEP keymanagement for WLAN security enhancement

Abstract

A wireless local area network (WLAN) is a flexible data communication system implemented as an extension to or as an alternative for a wired local area network (LAN). The 802.11 standard defines the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol and encapsulation of data frames for the purpose of security of the wireless LAN systems. It is intended to provide data privacy to the level of a wired network. WEP suffered threat of attacks from hackers owing to certain security shortcomings in the WEP protocol. Despite its shortcomings one cannot undermine the importance of WEP as it still remains the most widely used system. WEP suffers security pitfalls due to weak key management of the shared secret key and initialization vector (IV) repetitions. To overcome these problems, the existing WEP protocol is modified in this project to enhance the security of WLAN systems by dynamically changing the WEP key based on the network traffic intensity and updating it frequently based on the number of frames transmitted by using fuzzy logic which ensures message privacy as the encryption is not breached.