An RC4 based lightweight security protocol.

摘要

A wide deployment of wireless computing devices is becoming increasingly popular. Since risks are inherent in wireless technology, more concern needs to be given to security in wireless communications.; In this thesis, we present a lightweight security protocol based on the forward and backward property of the RC4 states to provide an alternative security solution for IEEE 802.11 networks, which also can be applied and extended to many existing and future networks. A software project is designed and implemented to simulate the proposed protocol.; The proposed protocol is highly competitive with popular existing protocols. Its simplicity and efficiency benefit from the RC4 stream cipher and the forward and backward property of the RC4 states. The proposed protocol has the ability to handle situations in which packets are received in an arbitrary order with no strong synchronization requirement. As well, the proposed protocol achieves data confidentiality, data authentication, data integrity, and data freshness. It offers semantic security and has the ability to defend against many popular attacks. In addition, the proposed protocol can be widely used in most applications, including battery-operated systems such as wireless sensor networks. The proposed protocol supports one-to-one secure communications as well as broadcast and multicast.