Elliptic Curve Cryptography Research And Application In The 802.1x Wireless Lan Certification

Compared with conventional LAN, the WLAN has a lot of advantages, such as movability, convenience to access, confidentiality, antijamming, easy to maintain and low cost. Now, the most widely used WLAN technology is based on IEEE 802.11 standard. However, the traditional security methods, for example WEP, are proved not insecure. For the above reason, new security mechanism for WLAN is necessary to make sure the data in transmission confidential, complete and undeniable. At the same time, it should provide identity certification and access control. The 802.1X fulfils all the above requirements, which provides an upgraded certification and authentication method for controlling LAN users'access through port-based certification.First of all, the defects of the IEEE802.11 are analyzed. Moreover, a detailed depiction of the IEEE 802.1X's authentication mechanism and the EAP-TLS's authentication mechanism, which are based on port-based access control, is given. As the discussion, the 802.1X is easy to extend and supports various authentication mechanisms, among which EAP-TLS is the most popular one. The EAP-TLS provides a two-way authentication between the client and server, key exchange and dynamic key in authentication procedure, which make sure the security of the process of authentication. After that, an introduction of the relative knowledge of the 802.1X, PKI and the ellipse cipher system is given.At last, the implementation of a WLAN authentication system based on the 802.1X, in which EAP-TLS certification protocol and the ellipse key algorithm are used, is given. The authentication system includes applicant system in client, authentication system and servers using radius. In the implementation, the ECC signature algorithm is used to create certification, and the ECMQV is used in key negotiation stage. The ellipse key algorithm is stronger and quicker in encryption and decryption than conventional algorithm– RSA, so it provides a method, which has a faster and better security in the data transmission.