TUTORIAL: Sunday August 22, 1 PM - 5 PM

TITLE: Security in Public Wireless Networks

INSTRUCTOR: Dr. Milind M. Buddhikot, Lucent Bell

ABSTRACT:
Recent trends indicate that two complementary technologies, namely IEEE 802.11 Wireless LANs (1-54 Mbps, 100-300 feet range) and Third generation (3G) wide-area wireless networks (64Kbps to 2.4 Mbps, few kms range) such as CDMA2000 and UMTS will compete and co-exist to offer wireless Internet access to end-users. One key aspect of these networks is the security architecture and associated protocols used to authenticate, encrypt and bill end user communication. The authentication phase is the first step that verifies user credentials, establishes required service class, derives session keys such as encryption and anonymization keys and commences billing before the user can access network services.

The performance and flexibility of wireless data services will be dramatically improved if users can seamlessly roam across the two kinds of networks. Given this, the Network Service Providers (NSP s) will integrate their networks using roaming agreements that allow such seamless roaming. Efficient, high performance authentication and re-authentication and derivation of session keys using a common profile shared among all NSPs will play a critical role in such integration.

This tutorial will focus on emerging stand-alone and integrated local and wide-area wireless networks such as 802.11, 3G1X, 1XEV-DO and UMTS. It will provide in-depth knowledge of state-of-the-art security architectures, protocols, and network and client systems for user authentication, dynamic session key negotiation, encryption and accounting in these networking technologies. It will also highlight known limitations, attacks, and security weaknesses.

The tutorial will address the following topics

  • Authentication, Key exchange and Encryption in Wide-area Wireless Networks
  • Authentication and Key Exchange in Integrated Public Wireless Networks
  • State-of-the-art in systems and services
  • Conclusions

    BIOGRAPHY:
    Milind M. Buddhikot is a Member of Technical Staff in the Center for Networking Research at Lucent Bell Labs. His research interests are in the areas of systems and protocols for public wireless networks, dynamic authentication and key exchange, multihop wireless and dynamic spectrum access. Milind holds a Doctor of Science (D. Sc.) in computer science (July 1998) from Washington University in St. Louis. He has served on program committees of several conferences and currently serves as the Editor of IEEE/ACM Transaction on Networking (TON). Milind is a key member of the team that developed Lucent Technologies’ 802.11+3G integration architecture strategy and built the 802.11/3G IOTA integration gateways. The team was awarded the prestigious Bell Labs President’s Silver Award for outstanding innovations and contributions in March 2003 and Bell Labs Team Award in Dec 2003. Milind is also a co-architect of the Shared Key Exchange (SKE) scheme and a technical leader of the team responsible for implementing EAP-SIM/AKA and EAP-SKE protocols in Lucent NAVIS AAA product.