An Elliptic Curve Based Handoff Authentication Protocol for WLAN

This paper proposes a novel handoff authentication protocol for WLAN. It uses an elliptic curve based mechanism to design an authentication and key agreement protocol for handoff in the 802.11r domain, and it can effectively defend all known attacks to WLAN including the denial-of-service attack and the domino effect attack. Moreover, our scheme includes only two messages between two parties, and requires few cpu cycles. Therefore, during handoff authentication process, our scheme enjoys both computation efficiency and communication efficiency as compared to the 802.11r authentication scheme.