Lightweight authentication and key management on 802.11 with Elliptic Curve Cryptography

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) have experienced a significant growth during the last decade due to ever emerging and heavy resource demanding applications. Widely used IEEE 802.11 may unexpectedly require long durations in association compared to what Voice over IP (VoIP), Video on Demand (VoD) and other real-time applications can tolerate. In this paper, we implement HIP-WPA; a novel approach of Fast Initial Authentication (FIA) which is a combination of Host Identity Protocol Diet EXchange (HIP-DEX) with some features of Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) technology. This approach provides the necessary IP layer elevated security mechanisms in order to face the challenges of fast authentication in WLANs. HIP-DEX introduces a radically new way of authenticating hosts by using Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) only with two message exchanges and therefore improves the authentication delay by 300% compared to WPA2. Thus, this is an effective solution to be used with any type of real-time application for intra-network (Basic Service Set (BSS) transitions) and internetwork (Extended Service Set (ESS) transitions) handovers.

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