Dynamic key management for secure continuous handoff in wireless LAN

Abstract

The secure dynamic key management has been introduced in the wireless security standard, IEEE802.11i. However, dynamic keys are very limited and their lifetime is very short. In addition, those keys must be initialized by a central authority before sending them to all communicating hosts, and the key must be renewed after every single use. This paper proposes a novel dynamic key management mechanism in wireless networks for fast authentication and secure continuous roaming. Our work focuses on generating session keys independently after the first pair-wise session key has been established between a mobile node and the home access point. The OMNet++ network simulator is used for performance evaluation. The roaming performance is measured using three scenarios having different parameters including moving speed, background workload, and client density. The experimental results show that our proposed work outperforms the standard IEEE802.11i and gives high scalability as well. ©2010 IEEE.