A Dual Authentication Protocol for IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs

In this paper, we first identify a vulnerability of IEEE 802.11 wireless LANs in which a compromised access point can still authenticate itself to a wireless station and gain control over the connection, and show that the current IEEE 802.11i standard does not address this problem. We then propose a new protocol that can counter this attack by providing dual authentication for both a wireless station and its corresponding access point at connection setup time using the authentication server. We also consider roaming situations and present a roaming authentication protocol. Finally, we show that our protocol is in conformance with the requirements of the IEEE 802.11i standard, and show that it performs no worse with respect to communication time than IEEE 802.1li using a prototype implementation of each protocol.