Abstract: Generally, in wireless networks there are a certain number of candidate user authentication protocols which can be selected from, and how to select one that can fulfill the user’s personalized requirements is an unsolved problem. There already are some studies on the authentication protocols, but most of them are from the protocol designers’ perspective. To the best of our knowledge, this paper is the first to study how to select authentication protocols with considering the user’s personalized requirements in wireless networks. From the perspective of users, we propose a solution that guides users to select from different authentication protocols according to their personalized requirements, taking into users’ most concerning factors, e.g., security, energy consumption, authentication delay and their preference. The energy consumption is defined as the sum of the energy consumption of user transmitting, receiving messages and cryptographic operations involved in the process of interaction. The cryptographic operations include Hash algorithm, RSA key exchange, digital signature, symmetric encryption and decryption algorithm. Adopting our solution to the EAP protocols in WLAN, we evaluate the security and performance of the EAP-PEAP, EAP-TLS, EAP-TTLS/MD5 and EAP-TTLS/MSCHAPV2. The results show that, regardless of how users set the weight, EAP-TTLS/MSCHAPV2 and EAP-TTLS/MD5 are always better than EAP-PEAP and EAP-TLS.

Key words: user authentication protocol, wireless network, security, performance, energy consumption