An efficient WLAN initial access authentication protocol

Nowadays, with the rapid increase of WLAN-enabled mobile devices, new scenarios emerge which require a more efficient WLAN initial link setup mechanism, and an access authentication method faster than the current IEEE 802.11i is desired. Our analysis indicates that the essential reason resulting in the inefficiency of 802.11i is that it is designed from the framework perspective which introduces too many messages. To overcome the drawbacks, an efficient initial access authentication protocol is proposed which realizes the authentications and key distribution through 2 roundtrip messages between the mobile device and the networks. Analysis indicates that our proposal is of the same security as the 4-way handshake protocol. The experiment result shows that our scheme can improve the authentication delay of the EAP-TLS by 94.7%. Furthermore, a simple and practical method is presented to enable it to be compatible with 802.11i.