Triple Layered Encryption Algorithm for IEEE 802.11 WLANs in E-Government Services

Abstract

Wireless local area network (WLAN) can provide e-government services at all levels, from local to national as the WLAN enabled devices have the flexibility to move from one place to another within offices while maintaining connectivity with the network. However, government organizations are subject to strict security policies and other compliance requirements. Therefore, WLAN must ensure the safeguard the privacy of individual data with the strictest levels of security. The 802.11 MAC specifications describe an encryption protocol called Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) which is used to protect wireless communications from eavesdropping. It is also capable of preventing unauthorized access. However, the WEP protocol often fails to accomplish its security goal due to the weakness in RC4 and the way it is applied in WEP protocol. This paper focuses the improvement of existing WEP protocol using the varying secret key for each transmission. This will remove the insecurities that currently make the RC4 unattractive for secured networking and this will add further cryptographic strength if applied to Rijndael algorithm. Our result shows that the proposed algorithm is more suitable for small and medium packets and AES for large packets.