A secure three-way handshake authentication process in IEEE 802.11i

Abstract

The significance of wireless devices has been growing day by day. Performance and security are an essential issue, leading to more trustworthy and effective communications. IEEE 802.11i is the most updated security protocol for wireless LAN. Authentication and Key management is a major portion of a secure wireless communication. An IEEE 802.11i usage the IEEE 802.1X standard for authentication; and for key management and distribution, Four-way handshake protocol is used. Research has presented that there are various security concerns associated with the authentic IEEE 802.11i authentication protocol. The most severe of these security concerns is the key recapture attack, during which attackers are able to recover the secret key and use it to get access to a targeted network. In order to alleviate this severe security susceptibility, the aim of this paper is to investigate those vulnerabilities and enhance the IEEE 802.11i standard by presenting a substitute enhanced three-way handshake authentication protocol which can efficiently forestall the key recapture attack. In addition, this technique reduces the memory overheads and computation.