An efficient elliptic curve cryptography based authenticated key agreement protocol for wireless LAN security

Failure of the wired equivalent privacy (WEP) protocol largely stimulated the research and development of a security protocols for wireless local area networks. Industry alliances and IEEE responded with Wi-Fi protected access (WPA) and IEEE 802.11i for the solutions to the aforementioned problem. This paper proposes a mutually authenticated key agreement protocol that employs elliptic curve digital signature algorithm (ECDSA) and elliptic curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) exchange intended for mutual authentication and key exchange respectively. To support both the basic service set (BSS) network and extended service set (ESS) network two different versions of the protocol have also been derived from the original one. The design objective was the efficiency and compatibility to 802.11i standard.