A Security Solution for IEEE 802.11's Ad-hoc Mode: Password-Authentication and Group Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange

Authors: E. Bresson, O. Chevassut and D. Pointcheval

Abstract:
The IEEE 802 standards ease the deployment of networking infrastructures and enable employers to access corporate networks while traveling. These standards provide two modes of communication called infrastructure and ad-hoc modes. A security solution for the IEEE 802.11's infrastructure mode took several years to reach maturity and firmware are still been upgraded, yet a solution for the ad-hoc mode needs to be specified. The present paper is a first attempt in this direction. It leverages the latest developments in the area of password-based authentication and (group) Diffie-Hellman key exchange to develop a provably-secure key-exchange protocol for IEEE 802.11's ad-hoc mode. The protocol allows users to securely join and leave the wireless group at time, accommodates either a single-shared password or pairwise-shared passwords among the group members, or at least with a central server; achieves security against dictionary attacks in the ideal-hash model (i.e. random-oracles). This is, to the best of our knowledge, the first such protocol to appear in the cryptographic literature.

Keywords:
Dictionary Attacks, Dynamic Group Key Exchange, Diffie-Hellman, Security Model.

Reference:
International Journal of Wireless and Mobile Computing (IJWMC), 2007.

Full paper: PostScript, PDF.

Related papers:
E. Bresson, O. Chevassut, and D. Pointcheval, "Group Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange secure Against Dictionary Attacks", Proceedings of Asiacrypt'02, Queenstown, New Zealand, Dec 1-5, 2002, pp 497--514. 

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