Enhanced 3-way handshake protocol for key exchange in IEEE 802. 11i

Authentication and key exchange is a challenging area in wireless networks. The authentication process of IEEE 802.11i is using the standards of IEEE 802.1X for authentication; and for key management and distribution, 4-way handshake protocol is used. Due to various design flaws, 4-way handshake is incapable in providing the security and performance. In this paper, we propose a new technique for key exchange which is able to provide an enhance security in comparison with 4-way handshake protocol. This enhanced technique called, 3-way handshake, is able to provide security against DoS attacks, dictionary attacks, replay attacks and passive attacks. In this technique 3 messages are exchanged for generating the pairwise transient key (PTK). Those messages are encrypted using two keys. The proposed model has been verified analytically and shows that not only security but also better performance can be achieved using this model. Moreover, this technique can reduce the communication, computation and memory overheads.