Abstract

Several symmetric and asymmetric encryption based authentication protocols have been developed for the wireless local area networks (WLANs). However, recent findings reveal that these protocols are either vulnerable to numerous attacks or computationally expensive. Considering the demerits of these protocols and the necessity to provide enhanced security, a lightweight extensible authentication protocol based authentication protocol for WLAN-connected Internet of Things devices is presented. We conduct an informal and formal security analysis to ensure robustness against the attacks. Furthermore, the empirical performance analysis and comparison show that the proposed protocol outperforms its counterparts, reducing computational, communication, storage costs, and energy consumption by up to 99%, 80%, 91.8%, and 98%, respectively. Simulation results of the protocol using the NS3 and its overhead under unknown attacks demonstrate that the proposed protocol performs better in all scenarios. A prototype implementation of the protocol has also been tested to evaluate its feasibility in real-time applications.