Date of Award

2004

Publication Type

Master Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.Sc.

Department

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Keywords

Computer Science.

Supervisor

Wu, Huapeng,

Rights

info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

Abstract

In wireless network, security concerns have haunted 802.11 deployments since the standardization effort began. IEEE attempts to provide confidentiality by using WEP (Wire Equivalent Privacy), and treats WEP as an option during the authentication. Unfortunately, WEP had been proved that neither authentication nor data confidentiality is reliable. For the short-term solution, IEEE offers TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol) to address the flaws found in 802.11, combined with 802.1X for authentication. In order to provide solid mutual authentication and key-distribution, TLS (Transport Layer Security) handshake protocol has been used in 802.1X. However, since TLS was not designed specifically for 802.11 in WLAN, there are some redundant steps in TLS which is not necessary if used for 802.11. Furthermore, in WLAN, it is normal that the computation abilities between client and server could be significantly different, which make the client a bottleneck during the handshake process. According to those drawbacks, a new protocol for authentication and key-distribution is proposed in this thesis. This new protocol can not only eliminate the redundant steps in TLS handshake, but also reduce the time consumption for client during the authentication and key-distribution by applying "unbalanced RSA". The proposed protocol with the use of "unbalanced RSA" solves the problems in original 802.11 standard, while offering efficiency and security at the same time.Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Paper copy at Leddy Library: Theses & Major Papers - Basement, West Bldg. / Call Number: Thesis2004 .Z546. Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 43-05, page: 1761. Advisers: Huapeng Wu; Kemal Tepe. Thesis (M.A.Sc.)--University of Windsor (Canada), 2004.

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