Secure Communication in 802.11 Networks with a Novel Protocol Using Quantum Cryptography

Abstract

It is the fact that wireless local area networks are increasingly deployed by businesses, government and SOHO users as they offer many advantages to its customers with mobility, flexibility, convenience etc. It opened a wide range of new commercial areas for hardware vendors, at low cost. This justifies why wireless networks have become one of the most widely used communication systems in the world. However, since there are no boundaries in wireless networks, they are vulnerable to security threats than wired networks. Therefore, providing secure communication for wireless networks has become one of the prime concerns. Quantum cryptography, to be precise, Quantum Key Distribution (QKD), offers the promise of unconditional security. In this paper, we extend our previous research work of how QKD can be used in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks to ensure secure key distribution. Our contributions in this paper are as follows: (1) We discussed how QKD can be used in IEEE 802.11 wireless networks to securely distribute the keys. (2) We use new protocol QKD. (3) We introduced a method that take the advantage of mutual authentication features offered by some EAP variants of 802.1X Port-Based Network Access Control. (4) Finally, we present a new code called Quantum Message Integrity Code (Q-MIC) which provides mutual authentication between the two communication parties. Also experimental results are presented with Simulink Model.