ronny.haryan.to

I just finished writing a research paper on 802.1X authentication as part of the assessments in one of the subjects I’m taking this semester. I will do a presentation on this topic to the class and the faculty this Saturday. The abstract of the paper is given below.

The paper is available in PDF format.

The ever increasing complexity of today’s applications and services demands better security design and implementations. One of the most popular new technologies today is wireless LAN. It has different characteristics compared to the wired LAN so it requires new ways to provide proper security and authentication for wireless solutions. There are some early workarounds that tried to address wireless LAN security, one of the most popular was Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) which proved to be inadequate. 802.1X is the authentication part of the solution to the overall security problem.

The IEEE 802.1X is a standard that tries to address authentication issues by utilising an authentication protocol called Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) encapsulated over LANs, or EAPOL for short, that in turn utilizes many existing protocols for authentication such as PPP, MD5, TLS, CHAP, and RADIUS. 802.1X can be used for wireless as well as wired LANs.

This paper will discuss EAP and 802.1X in more details, what it is, how it works, what components are needed and how they interact with each other, where it can be used, some examples, and more. This paper could also provide some understanding of the 802.1X and EAP technology to network designers so that they can utilize it in their wired and/or wireless solutions.