An EAP-BT smartcard for authentication in the next generation of wireless communications

Wireless LANs based on the IEEE 802.11b have emerged as a new standard but still a lot of security issues remain. One of them issues is the authentication of a terminal to an access point (AP). The IEEE has released a secure architecture, IEEE 802.1x, based on the extensible authentication protocol (EAP). Similarly at the ETSI, the 3GPP has studied EAP to be used with Universal SIM (USIM) modules. In this paper, we propose an authentication architecture where smartcards play a key role.