Novel WLAN hotspot authentication

The following paper describes the challenges of providing consistent authentication procedures across WLAN hotspots owned by different operators, where the set of credentials that the user should present to the network can be quite large depending on user subscription and inter-operator roaming agreements. This paper provides a description of the set of features that are needed to support secure, authenticated access to the network, and highlights how current authentication solutions provide at least some of these features. Finally the paper introduces two new techniques for enhancing the operation of these authentication solutions to provide a consistent "look and feel" and level of security across different hotspots.