Performance evaluation of IEEE 802.1x authentication methods and recommended usage

Authors:
Monis Akhlaq;Baber Aslam;Muzammil A. Khan;John Mellor;M. Noman Jafri;Irfan Awan
Affiliations:
Mobile Computing, Networks and Security Research Group, School of Informatics, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK;Computer Science Department, School of Electrical Engg and Computer Science, University of Central Florida, Orlando, FL;Information Security Department, College of Signals, National University of Science & Technology, Rawalpindi, Pakistan;Mobile Computing, Networks and Security Research Group, School of Informatics, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK;Electrical Engineering Department, College of Signals, National University of Science & Technology, Rawalpindi, Pakistan;Mobile Computing, Networks and Security Research Group, School of Informatics, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK
Venue:
WSEAS TRANSACTIONS on COMMUNICATIONS
Year:
2008

Citing 4
Cited 0

Measured Performance of the IEEE 802.11 Wireless LAN

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Throughput performance of the distributed and point coordination functions of an IEEE 802.11 wireless LAN

ICCC '02 Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Computer communication
Comparative analysis of IEEE 802.1x authentication methods

ICCOM'07 Proceedings of the 11th Conference on 11th WSEAS International Conference on Communications - Volume 11
Security performance of loaded IEEE 802.11b wireless networks

Computer Communications

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Abstract

The wide spread acceptance of IEEE WLANs is a result of industrial standardization to ensure product compatibility and reliability among various manufacturers. Several WLANs solutions are available with varying characteristics and interoperability. The IEEE Standard 802.11 is one of the most widely adopted mechanisms for wireless LANs. It defines both physical (PHY) and medium access control (MAC) layer protocol however; it provides limited data confidentiality and has cumbersome procedure for key exchange. In response IEEE introduced a port based network access control standard 802.1x to authenticate and authorize devices interconnected various IEEE 802 LANs. 802.1x only defines authentication not the actual authentication method which allows the developers to construct their own algorithm and consequently a lot of wireless vendors implemented their own 802.1x adaptation such as MD5 Message Digest 5, TLS (Transport Layer Security), TTLS (Tunneled TLS), PEAP (Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol), LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol) and others. This versatility in 802.1x adaptations has made it difficult for the WLANs users to choose an appropriate mechanism in relation to performance and security of networks. An effort has been made in [1] to carry out comparative analysis of IEEE authentication methods in different security combinations. This work supplements the efforts cited in [1] and incorporates more results in added network configurations. The paper finally recommends the users an appropriate IEEE authentication methods depending upon the need, requirements and security concerns.