A secure dynamic cryptographic and encryption protocol for wireless networks

Abstract

With the fast growth of wireless networking in population, security became an essential issue for data privacy. Encryption mechanisms relying on static key structure, such as WEP (802.11) and TKIP (802.1x), are vulnerable to key cracking by capturing wireless packets. Although new standards have been developed to fulfill this gap, there is still a lack of a stable security protocol. In this paper, we present a light-weight and solid i-key encryption protocol to enhance the security of wireless communication. With this dynamic re-keying mechanism, only valid clients can decrypt the ciphertext and reveal the message by using the unique secret i-key they have to prevent the sensitive data from being accessed by unauthorized recipients. In addition, test results indicate that i-key protocol can perform efficiently in different wireless environment.