Abstract

Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) have experienced significant growth in the last two decades due to the extensive use of wireless devices. Security (especially authentication) is a staple concern as the wireless medium is accessible to everybody. Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) is the widely used authentication framework in WLANs to secure communication. The authentication mechanism designed on EAP is called EAP method. There are numerous EAP based and non-EAP based authentication protocols for WLANs, but there is no protocol that fulfills all the security requirements, as mentioned in RFC-4017 and other additional requirements like perfect forward secrecy, Denial-of-service (DoS) attack protection, and lightweight computation. Hence, it is fair to infer that there is an impelling need to design a protocol that can meet all the security requirements. In this paper, we propose a secure and user efficient EAP-based authentication protocol for IEEE 802.11 WLANs. The proposed protocol has been formally validated by BAN logic and the AVISPA tool [18]. The simulation results depict that the proposed protocol achieves all security requirements, as mentioned in RFC-4017 along with perfect forward secrecy, Denial-of-service (DoS) attack protection, and lightweight computation. The proposed protocol outperforms the existing protocols in terms of computation cost by reducing the computation cost by ≈99.9956%, 99.991%, 27.27%, 22.705% in comparison to EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS, EAP-Ehash, EAP-SELUA, respectively.