Fast secure handoff in public wireless LANs

The ubiquity of wireless local area networks (WLANs) is enabling the emergence of a wide range of mobile computing applications. One of the challenges for secure wireless LANs is to enable secure handoff between access points with minimum delays. We propose a scheme for public WLANs that performs authentication using the TESLA (time efficient stream loss-tolerant authentication) broadcast authentication protocol. Our approach generates new keys when needed. Our scheme achieves authentication and the generation of keys simultaneously while the supplicant is in the discovery phase (that is, searching for an AP which is nearest to it) leading to low latency during handoff.