Securing IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs - A Mobile Agent Based Architecture

The infrastructure based IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs (WLANs) are wide open in nature and are prone for varieties of attacks. Present security mechanisms are not comprehensive enough to overcome these attacks. In this paper we discuss the possible attacks in WLANs and the drawbacks of the existing security mechanisms. We provide a security architecture which uses mobile agents as a security facilitator. Our architecture assures secured communication by two way authentication between the access point and the wireless nodes.