Design of efficient and secure authentication schemes in IEEE 802.11ah networks

• Main Author: Zhang, Lyuye
• Other Authors: Ma Maode
• Format: Theses and Dissertations
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: DRNTU::Engineering::Electrical and electronic engineering
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/75846
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The increasing deployment of smart devices has proved that Internet of Things (IoT) is a new trend for the next era. The IEEE 802.11ah, a specification belonging to the 802.11 Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) protocol family, has been recently released to support the long-range, low-power and low-rate wireless communications among smart devices used in IoT systems. However, security requirements of the energy-constrained devices have plenty of features different from the traditional line-powered devices. Due to the relatively high overhead and latency, link setup protocol, such as IEEE 802.11i, does not meet the requirements of IoT networks. It requires that the lightweight protocol has to support low-power and low-latency features of IoT devices. To meet these demands, an upcoming solution proposed by IEEE 802.11 group, which was specified in IEEE 802.11ai. It is called the Fast Initial Link Setup (FILS), a brand-new method aiming at establishing fast and secure links among devices to be applied to 802.11ah networks. Based on the FILS, this thesis has proposed two enhancement proposals tailored for the 802.11ah networks regarding the authentication process in the link setup procedures to improve security and efficiency. The first proposal is to improve the efficiency of link setup procedure, and the second proposal is designed to enhance the security of FILS without degrading its performance.