Integration of a quantum protocol for mutual authentication and secret key distribution within 802.11i standard

By relying upon the laws of quantum physics, quantum cryptography is reaching an extremely high level of security guarantee. It allows establishing a secret and perfectly random key material between two network nodes. It improves the contemporary cryptographic methods based only on computational security by integrating a quantum cryptographic solution. Since quantum technology becomes an attractive prospect, our overriding objective is to provide a quantum key agreement scheme that properly authenticates users in 802.11i networks. In this paper, we introduce a quantum scheme, for mutual authentication and key establishment for the integration within IEEE 802.11 networks towards absolute communication security. The key issued from the quantum algorithm authenticates the two endpoints and will be used for building the pairwise key and the group key hierarchies. To analyze the security of our approach, a formal verification of some security properties is performed using PRISM as a model checker tool.