Authentication and key establishment in wireless networks

Abstract

Wireless networks have gained overwhelming popularity over their wired counterpart due to their great flexibility and convenience, but only after their security issues have been resolved can wireless networks be extensively applied in the real world. In this thesis, we investigate authentication and key establishment in wireless networks. We first propose two authentication and key exchange protocols for access control in wireless LAN. Our protocols achieve not only authentication and secure key exchange, but also user anonymity and resistance to DoS attacks. We then investigate group key management protocols for wireless ad hoc networks, and propose a highly efficient group key agreement scheme based on a novel key tree construction approach. We also present an efficient password-based group key agreement protocol that can be employed in wireless mesh networks where trusted servers are available. We evaluate and analyze performance of our protocols, and the results show that our protocols are efficient in computation and communications.