Performance Evaluation and Analysis of Wi-Fi Security Protocols

Abstract

In the twenty-first century as the technology evolves in a rapid pace, more and more number of users and businesses are getting connected to the Internet. A vast majority of these users use the wireless mode (Wi-Fi) for getting connected to the Internet. As the number of users and the online transactions rises in billions so is the risk of a cyber-fraud, due to the vulnerabilities present in the Wi-Fi protocols (WEP, WPA and WPA2). Security remains a huge challenge as Wi-Fi passwords could be cracked from both home and enterprise-level networks by using the tools and by performing social engineering attacks. Data protection is a huge challenge for computer scientists, and in this work, the investigators have identified the loopholes of Wi-Fi encryption protocols. The identification procedures are tested on a test network with various Wi-Fi encryption protocols in a controlled laboratory setup. Data packets from the wireless networks could be easily sniffed by using aircrack-ng software suite for capturing the handshake and ultimately for cracking the password from huge wordlists. The process of cracking the password could also be speed up by using a Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) which performs set of repetitive tasks in a faster way and helps in extracting passwords. The overall investigation helps investigators to understand the vulnerabilities present in the modern-day Wi-Fi protocols. Hence, it has been proposed the use of RADIUS server model like in an enterprise network and the use of Wi-Max standard of security for better safety measures.