Performance analysis of the confidentiality security service in the IEEE 802.11 using WEP, AES-CCM, and ECC

The wired equivalent privacy (WEP) protocol presents several vulnerabilities and therefore the IEEE 802.11 should use other cryptosystem, symmetric or asymmetric. For the former, this paper proposes the usage of advanced encryption standard-counter with cipher block chaining-message authentication code (AES-CCM); for the second the usage of elliptic curve cryptosystems (ECC). This paper presents the time required for encrypting the frame body field of the IEEE 802.11 MAC frame using WEP, AES-CCM, and ECC for several data sizes and comparable key sizes. Results confirm that symmetric crypto algorithms are more efficient than those asymmetries for providing the confidentiality service, with WEP being fastest followed by AES-CCM.