NOVEL NEUROCOMPUTING-BASED SCHEME TO AUTHENTICATE WLAN USERS EMPLOYING DISTANCE PROXIMITY THRESHOLD

摘要

The IEEE 802.11 standard is considered one of the most popular and profitable network topology in use today. As with the growth of every other technology, the scalability of Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) comes with the burden of ensuring the integrity, confidentiality and trust in the network. By integrity we need to develop a mechanism by which only authorized users can gain access to the network resources. Confidentiality implies that every data transmitted by each user stays known only to the communication parties. The above two characteristics can then enforce a trust environment in which all wireless nodes and users are authorized and secure. In this paper, we propose a scheme to authenticate and authorize 802.11 wireless nodes within a network. Our proposed scheme relies on neural networks decision engine that restricts network access to mobile nodes whose physical location is within a threshold distance from the wireless access point or the controller of the network. We present a detailed description of the work done as well as a performance analysis of this scheme.