Comparative Analysis of IEEE 802.1x Authentication Methods

The IEEE Standard 802.11 is one of the most widely adopted mechanisms for WLANs, it provides comprehensive guidelines for their operational smoothness. 802.11 suffered from limited data confidentiality and cumbersome procedure for exchange of security parameters. In response to the security limitations in 802.11, IEEE introduced 802.1x for authentication and key management. The 802.1x is a port based network access control protocol that uses Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) at the transport layer. The 802.1x only defines authentication mechanism and does not recommend any appropriate authentication method. Consequently wireless vendors implemented their own 802.1x adaptations such as MD5 (Message Digest 5), TLS (Transport Layer Security), TTLS (Tunneled TLS), PEAP (Protected Extensible Authentication Protocol), LEAP (Lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol) etc. The paper analyses the performance of 802.1x authentication with respect to different solutions i.e, EAP TLS, PEAP and EAP TTLS. The network performance is gauged with respect to throughput, round time trip (RTT)/response time and packet error in different configurations. Key-Words: Authentication, EAP, Packet Error, Round Trip Time, Security, Throughput, Wireless LANs, 802.1x.