User Identity Protection in Wireless Local Area Networks

Wireless networks are susceptible to security attacks due to their open transmission media. Therefore, wireless network security is somewhat more complex than that of wired network security. In wireless network security, authentication is the most essential procedure to ensure that the service is properly used by the intended users. Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol (PEAP) is widely being used in wireless networks. However, PEAP is shown to be a weak protocol in terms of protection of user identity. In this paper, we have designed and implemented a new and efficient wireless authentication protocol providing user identity secrecy. This method takes advantage of PEAP’s management easiness and the robustness of dynamic key distribution to provide user identity protection. Key words: wireless security; authentication; encryption; dynamic key.