Performance evaluation of authentication protocols for IEEE 802.11 standard

With the growing popularity of IEEE 802.11 WLAN Standards, securing authentication process between client, authenticator and authentication server has become of utmost importance. For securing the authentication process, Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) supports an open architecture allowing multiple EAP authentication methods to be used. EAP re-authentication protocol provides a consistent, method-independent and low-latency re-authentication mechanism for authentication in 802.11 wireless networks. Mechanisms of authentication usually exist above the physical layer. In few cases utilizing spread-spectrum technique, authentication process may exist at physical layer but incurring an additional cost on bandwidth. The present work aims to evaluate the performance of authentication protocols by comparing the security cost of EAP re-authentication protocol with EAP-TLS protocol at different processor speeds. We analyze a physical-layer authentication algorithm that utilizes channel probing and hypothesis testing to determine whether current and prior communication attempts are made by the same transmit terminal. We further report an enhanced physical-layer authentication scheme for multi-carrier wireless systems, which is capable of working with moderate terminal mobility. Numerical Results using simulation tool MATLAB in a typical indoor environments show that the scheme based on the Neyman-Pearson test is more robust against terminal mobility, and is able to detect spoofing attacks efficiently with small system overhead when the terminal moves with a normal pedestrian speed. The impact of system parameters on the performance has also been investigated.