A Secure WLAN Authentication Scheme

Message replay, malicious Access Point (AP) associations and Denial of Service (DoS) attacks are the major threats in Wireless LANs. These threats are possible due to a lack of proper authentication and insecure message communications between wireless devices. Current wireless authentication & key exchange (AKE) schemes and security protocols (WEP, WPA and IEEE 802.11i) are not sufficient against these threats. This paper presents a novel Secure WLAN Authentication Scheme (SWAS). The scheme introduces the delegation concept of mobile authentication in WLANs, and provides mutual authentication to all parties (Wireless Station, Access Point and Authentication Server). The messages involved in the process serve both authentication and key refreshing purposes. The scheme enhances the security by protecting the messages through cryptographic techniques and reduces the DoS impact. The results showed that cryptographic techniques do not result in extra latencies in authentication. The scheme also reduces the communication cost and network overhead.