Authentication Schemes for Wireless Local Area Networks

Abstract

The security has become an important issue in IEEE 802.11 Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) and it is always a major concern for their development and those networks based on wireless technology therefore as their security measures increase, the tools and techniques used to attack them from any third party also increase. WLANs are facing numerous problems linked to security threat issue from the point of view of Authentication, Confidentiality, Data integrity, and Anonymity, which expose legitimate users to several risks. This research addresses the authentication process for wireless Local Area networks, specifically Wi-Fi networks, while other security processes are not within the scope of this research . The authentication aspect is one of the major challenges in WLAN security issues that proves the identity of a certain entity requesting access to a network to reduce the possibility of illegitimate users to hijack the target network via impersonating a false identity. The 802.1X is a standard securing protocol of the IEEE that acts as an authentication framework for Wi-Fi networks. It's based on the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP ) protocol and its deployed method. EAP is a general authentication protocol, it has been widely used for that important aspect, which acts as an envelope consisting of different types of authentication methods that support various authentication procedures. The EAP defines several types of authentication methods for Wi-Fi networks, which can be classified into three categories: Secret-key method (E.g. EAP-MD5, EAP-LEAP), Public-key method (E.g. EAP-TLS), and Tunneled method (E.g. EAP-TTLS, EAP-PEAP). The Goal of this research is to analyze and show up the flaw of the existing EAP methods and identifying new generic EAP authentication methods. Forward one called EAP- Moderate Weight Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP-MEAP) belongs to a secret-key methods category, while the later one called EAP- Moderate Transport Layer Security Protocol (EAP-MTLS) belongs to a Public-key methods category according to the classification criteria of this research. These two generic EAP authentication methods enhanced and developed into several variant forms to satisfy the authentication requirements and they have a proper structure to be implemented and efficient for IEEE802.11WLANs (Wi- Fi and its application domains) as a solution to mitigate and overcome those presented flaws based on their properties. Finally, we have checked and verified the EAP- MEAP security properties using the specialized model checker AVISPA, which provides formal proofs of the security protocols.