Research Of The Tunneled Authentication Of The WLAN

WLAN security has become the focus, Along with its widely applications. Authentication is the first step of the network security. Due to space openness of the wireless media, the WLAN accessing can not be restricted by the physical borderline, so in order to protect the legal users to access the WLAN and refuse the illegal users, the Authentication of the WLAN is very important.This paper takes the Authentication of the WLAN as the research object. Firstly, this paper introduces the basic knowledge of IEEE 802.11 standard and analyzes the different mechanisms of authentication of IEEE 802.11, including Open System Authentication, Shared Key Authentication and MAC address filter. Secondly, authentication mechanism of the WLAN is studied: first of all, a discussion about authentication scheme of the WALN is present, then IEEE 802.1X and EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol) are analyzed in depth, at last the detailed authentication mechanism is analyzed, including the EAP mechanism based on password, EAP-TLS (EAP-Transport Layer Security) and EAP-TTLS (EAP-Tunneled Transport Layer Security) .Finally, based on the theoretical research, an experiment platform of EAP-TTLS based WLAN security system is constructed. This system consists three parts: freeRadius as back-end authentication server, AP supported WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) as authenticator and Odyssey Client as supplicant. Based on the analysis of the progress of authentication, a security analysis is given. At last, the paper put forward the effect of the tunneled authentication protocol: first, it is compatible of traditional protocol; second, it can protect the identity of user.