An enhanced lightweight authentication protocol for access control in wireless LANs

In this paper, an enhanced lightweight identity authentication protocol for access control in IEEE 802.11 networks are presented. The proposed protocol is nicely integrated with the current MAC frame structure and takes the most advantage of the redundancy bits inside the MAC frame header to convey the authentication information, as well as the synchronization information in case of synchronization loss happening. A much more efficient and fault-tolerant synchronization algorithm is given at the same time, which significantly improved the performance of the proposed protocol as compared to the previous ones. The proposed protocol is highly effective as evaluated via a thorough mathematical analysis. A quantitative attack detection framework is also established based on the evaluation result. Finally, the proposed protocol is well suited in a wireless constrained environment for its low communication and computation overheads, requiring only several additional bits (less than 8) for transmission and random bit generating operation.