LOTKIP: Low Overhead TKIP Optimization for Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Abstract

Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) is a provisional solution for Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) security loopholes present in already widely deployed legacy 802.11 wireless devices. In this work, we model and analyze the computational complexity of TKIP security mechanism and propose an optimized implementation, called LOTKIP, to decrease processing overhead for better energy efficient security performance. The LOTKIP improvements are based on minimizing key mixing redundancy and a novel frame encapsulation with low overhead. We simulate and compare LOTKIP with baseline TKIP in terms of complexity and energy consumption for ad hoc wireless network security. From simulation results, we demonstrate that LOTKIP executes with lower computational complexity, hence, with faster encryption time and more energy-efficient.