A new security key exchange channel for 802.11 WLANs

Abstract

Recently, public wireless local area network systems based on IEEE 802.11 are becoming popular in hot spot areas such as airports, department store, etc. The 802.1X and 802.11i were proposed to resolve some problems in 802.11. However, the 802. 1x still has some drawbacks and could be hijacked through middle of communication session. The main problems in the wireless LANs security standards are the key distribution and mutual authentication between the supplicant and the access point (AP). We propose another scheme to construct a secure channel for regular communication security. To aim at above, we propose a security key exchange scheme to avoid flaws and drawbacks. The prime purpose is to create a secure channel between supplicant and AP. Therefore, supplicant and AP need to compute session key individually. This scheme needs three phases and all steps of the phases are finished by public-key encryption. Thus, no information will be gotten between supplicant and server or between AP and server.