Flexible and fast security solution for wireless LAN

The great promise of wireless LAN will never be realized unless they have an appropriate security level. From this point of view, various researches have proposed many security protocols for wireless LAN. This is in order to handle WLAN security problems which are mostly due to the lack of physical protection in WLAN or because of the transmission on the radio link. In this paper, we propose a security protocol named FFTLS (flexible and fast transport layer security), an EAP authentication method that enables secure communication between a client and an authentication server in a powerful and flexible way. Unlike existing EAP authentication methods, FFTLS protocol has the ability to combine between shared secrets and certificate-based infrastructures and to natively ensure additional security services such as identity protection, non-repudiation and perfect forward secrecy. Moreover, it efficiently optimizes the computational time and the message flows needed to open secure sessions for both clients and authentication servers. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.