SAP: A Secure Low-latency Protocol for Mitigating High Computation
Overhead in WI-FI Networks
Abstract
The increase in popularity of wireless networks in industrial,
embedded, medical and public sectors has made them an appealing attack
surface for attackers who exploit the vulnerabilities in network
protocols to launch attacks such as Evil Twin, Man-in-the-middle,
sniffing, etc., which may result in economic and non-economic losses. To
protect wireless networks against such attacks, IEEE 802.11 keep
updating the protocol standards with new and more secure versions. There
has always been a direct correlation between attacks and the improvement
of protocol standards. As the sophistication of attacks increases,
protocol standards tend to move towards higher security, resulting in a
significant rise in both latency and computational overhead, and severe
degradation in the performance of low-latency applications such as
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), automotive, robotics, etc. In this
paper, we make the first attempt to highlight the importance of both
latency and security in wireless networks from implementation and
performance perspective. We make a review of existing IEEE 802.11
protocols in terms of security offered and overhead incurred to
substantiate the fact that there is a need of a protocol which in
addition to providing optimum security against attacks also maintains
the latency and overhead. We also propose a secure and low-latency
protocol known as Secure Authentication Protocol (SAP) which operates in
two phases - registration and authentication, where the first phase is a
one time process implemented using asymmetric cryptography and the
second phase is implemented using symmetric cryptography. The protocol
is structured in a way that it maintains the original structure of IEEE
802.11 protocols and performs both phases using fewer messages than
existing protocols. By simulating the protocol using well-established
OMNeT++ simulator, we proved that the proposed protocol incurs a low
computation overhead, making it ideal for low-latency applications. We
extensively verified the security properties of the proposed protocol
using formal verification through widely-accepted Scyther tool. Finally,
we perform a comparative analysis of SAP with existing IEEE 802.11
wireless network protocols to highlight the improvement.