An Early Warning System for 802.11i Wireless Networks

Abstract

With the increasing dependence on wireless LANs (WLANs), businesses and educational institutions are becoming more concerned about network security. The latest WLAN security protocol, the IEEE 802.11i assures rigid security for wireless networks with the support of IEEE 802.1X protocol for authentication, authorization and key distribution. However, users will remain sceptical unless they are confident and possess some form of assurance that the security mechanism is actually effective. In this view our Early Warning System (EWS) effectively confirms the legitimacy of the 802.11i security mechanism building confidence among the users. In this paper we outline our proposed WiFi-EWS for 802.11i wireless networks. Our system can effectively be used for anomaly detection and intrusion prevention. It has several levels of defence to protect the wireless networks from a range of possible threats. False alarms are raised only when all validations prove negative thus significantly reducing the number of false positives.