Abstract
The ubiquitous deployment of Rogue Access Points (RAPs) presents security issues in Wireless LAN (WLAN) environments. Therefore, authentication plays a crucial role in protecting mobile users in WLAN communications. Some implementations of the existing wireless authentication schemes rely on weak authentication methods such as a username and password. Other vulnerable implementations of wireless authentication schemes do not resist rogue access point attacks such as man-in-the-middle attacks and phishing attacks. In addition, the risk of these attacks is high since they could cause sensitive information disclosure for mobile users. In this paper, we introduce a new authentication scheme using mutual authentication that leverages two different communication channels to thwart various attacks. Our scheme uses a novel approach based on dual channels that add an extra security level to the authentication process. The proposed scheme utilizes the idea of "Call before visiting" which could prevent many different security attacks. This paper argues that the proposed design mitigates or removes several popular security attacks that are claimed to be effective in the existing wireless authentication schemes. Furthermore, the proposed method does not require any major modification in the wireless network architecture or any computational device to be used and deployed.