Analysing the EAP-TLS handshake and the 4-way handshake of the 802.11i standard

摘要

The IEEE 802.11i standard has been designed to enhance security in wireless networks. The EAP-TLS handshake aims to provide mutual authentication between supplicant and authentication server, and then derive the Pairwise Master Key (PMK). In the 4 -way handshake the supplicant and the authenticator use PMK to derive a fresh pairwise transient key (PTK). The PMK is not used directly for security while assuming the supplicant and authenticator have the same PMK before running 4- way handshake. In this paper, the EAP-TLS handshake and the 4-way handshake phases have been analysed with a proposed framework using Isabelle tool. In the analysis, we have found a new Denial-of-Service (DoS) attack in the 4-way handshake. The attack prevents the authenticator from receiving message 4 after the supplicant sends it out. This attack forces the authenticator to re-send the message 3 until time out and subsequently to de-authenticate supplicant. This paper has proposed improvements to the 4-way handshake to avoid the Denial-of-Service attack.