Providing Tunable Security Services: An IEEE 802.11i Example

The basic idea of QoS is to provide mechanisms that can offer different service levels, which are expressed through well-defined parameters that are specified at run-time on the basis of need. Bit rate, throughput, delay, jitter, and packet loss rate are all examples of common QoS parameters suggested for packet networks. These parameters are all aimed to express (and guarantee) a certain service level with respect to reliability and/or performance. In this paper, we investigate how security can be treated as yet another QoS parameter through the use of tunable security services. The main idea with this work is to let users specify a trade-off between security and performance through the choice of available security configuration(s). The performance metric used is latency. The concept is illustrated using the IEEE 802.11i wireless local area networking standard