ON THE EVALUATION OF A SECURE SOLUTION TO ACCESS 802.11 NETWORKS

摘要

Despite offering the possibility to develop and distribute a new set of applications to its users, the widespread and unrestricted use of mobile computing depends on the provisioning of a secure network environment. Regarding the communication established from mobile devices such as PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), one of the most currently used standards is the IEEE 802.11b, which presents known security flaws. To overcome them, some alternative setups are commonly deployed, based on link, network, transport or application-layer. In this paper we evaluate the impact on data reception rate and energy consumption of IPSec-based PDAs access to 802.11b (WiFi) wireless LANs. As a result of this work we identify the overhead imposed by the security mechanisms and the capacity of the device to run CPU and network-intensive applications.