Formal analysis of authentication in 802.11i

Authentication is the basis of the security of IEEE 802.11i standard. The authentication process in 802.11i involves two important protocols: a 4-way handshake and a group key handshake. A formal analysis of authentication in 802.11i is given via a belief multisets formalism. The analysis shows that the 4-way handshake and the group key handshake may provide satisfactory mutual authentication, key management, and issue of a new group temporal key from an access point to a user device, under the guarantee of mutual possession of a confidential pairwise master key. The analysis also shows that there exists a denial of service attack in the 4-way handshake and some seeming redundancies are useful in the protocol implementation.