A secure, efficient and lightweight user authentication scheme for wireless LAN

As demand for various multimedia applications with dissimilar quality of service rising quickly, provisioning of rapid and secure to the end clients is becoming a main challenge for the wireless network service suppliers. WLAN technologies are getting to be popular and the device is widely used everywhere the place these days, therefore a lot of issues are considered in the matter of wireless security. To prevent unauthorized access to network resources, user authentication is necessary. Since the current security protocol in WLAN particularly 802.1x is thought to be quite insecure, the IEEE 802.11i was proposed to resolve few problems in WLAN. However, the 802.1i still have some serious problems and will be accessed through the middle of the communication session. To improve a traditional security mechanism, we propose a novel lightweight authentication scheme that performs the authentications and key allotment through 2 round-trip messages between the mobile user and the authentication server. Our scheme is able to accomplish the quick rejoin process with frequently visited APs. Compared with 802.11i and other schemes, the proposed scheme not only improves efficiency by reducing computation cost and transmission cost, but also promotes security property.