An automated system interoperability test bed for WPA and WPA2

Abstract

The discovery of several attacks on WEP during the past few years has rendered the first WLAN security standard useless. Thus, new mechanisms had to be defined to protect current and future wireless infrastructures. However, some parts of the new standards WPA and WPA2/IEEE802.11i respectively require changes in the used hardware. To ensure interoperability between different vendor's products the Wi-Fi alliance provides a certificate that can be obtained by passing several fixed tests. Unfortunately, there exists no standard solution so far to get your products ready for the certification process. Each vendor has to do his homework by hand. To overcome this manual and error-prone process we have developed a test environment for conducting automated system interoperability tests. In this paper we outline the Wi-Fi certification process and categorize necessary test requirements to be fulfilled. We further discuss our solution, i.e., the setup of our test environment and selected implementation details of the associated control software.