Wireless AP Authentication Mechanism
Question
Adam works as a Network Administrator.
He discovers that the wireless AP transmits 128 bytes of plaintext, and the station responds by encrypting the plaintext.
It then transmits the resulting ciphertext using the same key and cipher that are used by WEP to encrypt subsequent network traffic.
Which of the following types of authentication mechanism is used here?
Answers
Explanations
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The authentication mechanism used here is Shared Key Authentication (SKA), which is a part of the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protocol.
In SKA, the access point (AP) and the client device share a secret key, and the client device is authenticated by the AP by challenging it to encrypt a plaintext message with the shared secret key. The AP then decrypts the resulting ciphertext using its own copy of the key and compares it to the original plaintext. If the decrypted ciphertext matches the original plaintext, the client device is authenticated and granted access to the network.
In this scenario, the plaintext message transmitted by the AP is 128 bytes long, and the client device responds by encrypting the message using the same key and cipher that are used by WEP to encrypt subsequent network traffic. This process of encrypting the plaintext message with the same key and cipher used for WEP encryption is the challenge-response mechanism used in SKA.
It's important to note that WEP is a weak encryption protocol and is vulnerable to various attacks, such as the Fluhrer-Mantin-Shamir (FMS) attack and the KoreK attack. Therefore, using SKA with WEP for authentication is not recommended and has been deprecated by the Wi-Fi Alliance.
To summarize, the authentication mechanism used in this scenario is Shared Key Authentication (SKA), which uses a challenge-response mechanism to authenticate the client device. The plaintext message transmitted by the AP is encrypted by the client device using the same key and cipher that are used for WEP encryption. However, using SKA with WEP for authentication is not recommended due to the vulnerabilities of the WEP encryption protocol.
