Title: Authentication Service in Wireless Networks and its Survivability

When: Thursday, March 4th 2004, 1:30-2:30 PM

Where: the 1st Floor Conference Room, IS Bldg

Who: Nattapong Swangmuang

Committee:

Dr. Prashant Krishnamurthy
Dr. Richard Thompson
Dr. David Tipper
Dr. Joseph Kabara

Abstract: The emergence of a new generation of wireless communications and demand for wide area mobile data services bring about new concerns of reliability along with vulnerability in accessing the wireless network infrastructure. In wireless networks, easy access to the radio links makes it vulnerable to eavesdropping and system intruding which result in exposure of information transmitted and unauthorized access of the communication services. Authentication service is therefore a fundamental security service that aims to maintain authorized access of communication service. However, this security service is critical in wireless communication service, because a failure or absence of component or primitive in authentication service can result in both security breaches and impact network availability simultaneously. Therefore, authentication service is concerned as both security bottleneck and performance bottleneck. The paper review several authentication services which are both currently applied and potentially integrated into wireless networks. Different authentication and key agreement techniques using both symmetric key and public key cryptography are explored along with its strengths and weaknesses. The survivability of authentication services in wireless networks is also presented.