Secure and Seamless Handoff Scheme for a Wireless LAN System

IEEE 802.11i standard specifies full authentication and preauthentication for secure handoff in 802.11 wireless LAN (WLAN). However, the full authentication is too slow to provide seamless services for handoff users, and preauthentication may fail in highly populated WLANs where it is highly probable that the cache entry of a preauthenticated user is evicted by other users before handoff. In this paper, we propose a seamless and secure handoff scheme by reducing authentication and key management delay in the handoff process. When a user handoffs, security context established between the user and the previous access point (AP) is forwarded from the previous AP to the current AP, and the session key is reused only for the handoff session. The freshness of session key is maintained by regenerating session keys after handoff session is terminated. The proposed scheme can achieve considerable reduction in handoff delay with providing the same security level as 802.1X authentication by letting an AP authenticate a handoff user before making an robust security network association (RSNA) with it.