Research on Innovative Secure Authentication Methods for Seamless Roaming in WAPI

This paper investigates the potential disconnections and reconnection issues that may arise during the roaming process in the wireless local area network (WLAN) authentication and privacy infrastructure (WAPI). The tripartite peer-to-peer security authentication architecture employed by WAPI, which includes the station (STA), access point (AP), and authentication server (AS), results in significantly longer authentication times during roaming compared to Wi-Fi. Hence, optimizing WAPI's security authentication methods and reducing the authentication duration are crucial to addressing these roaming issues. Based on the existing WAPI security authentication mechanisms, this paper proposes two innovative security authentication improvement schemes: pre-authentication and decentralization of the AS. These solutions aim to enhance WAPI's roaming performance significantly by employing smarter, more flexible, and adaptive authentication strategies, providing valuable insights for practitioners seeking to achieve fast and seamless roaming.