Keywords

WEP, IEEE 802.11, IV, WPA, RSN, Wireless Security

Abstract

The 802.11 standard defines the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and encapsulation of data frames. It is intended to provide data privacy to the level of a wired network. WEP suffered threat of attacks from hackers owing to certain security shortcomings in the WEP protocol. Lately, many new protocols like WiFi Protected Access (WPA), WPA2, Robust Secure Network (RSN) and 802.11i have come into being, yet their implementation is fairly limited. Despite its shortcomings one cannot undermine the importance of WEP as it still remains the most widely used system and we chose to address certain security issues and propose some modifications to make it more secure. In this thesis we have proposed a modification to the existing WEP protocol to make it more secure. We achieve Message Privacy by ensuring that the encryption is not breached. The idea is to update the shared secret key frequently based on factors like network traffic and number of transmitted frames. We also develop an Initialization Vector (IV) avoidance algorithm that eliminates IV collision problem. The idea is to partition the IV bits among different wireless hosts in a predetermined manner unique to every node. We can use all possible 224 different IVs without making them predictable for an attacker. Our proposed algorithm eliminates the IV collision ensuring Message Privacy that further strengthens security of the existing WEP. We show that frequent rekeying thwarts all kinds of cryptanalytic attacks on the WEP.

Notes

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Graduation Date

2005

Semester

Spring

Advisor

Guha, Ratan

Degree

Master of Science (M.S.)

College

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Department

Computer Science

Degree Program

Computer Science

Format

application/pdf

Identifier

CFE0000479

URL

http://purl.fcla.edu/fcla/etd/CFE0000479

Language

English

Release Date

May 2005

Length of Campus-only Access

None

Access Status

Masters Thesis (Open Access)

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