Enhancing WPS security

Abstract

The main concern on the use of wireless technologies is security, due to the nature of the medium. User awareness in order to implement efficient security configurations is an important requirement raised by the technology, undermining its use. Wireless Protected Setup (WPS) was introduced as a viable solution to the problem, offering automatic network setup and device configuration. WPS itself suffers from a security flaw; the feature has to be disabled on the devices and user confidence is subverted. In this work we propose to enhance WPS security through the Visual Device Pairing Security (ViDPSec) method to address this problem. ViDPSec is a user-based, lightweight device pairing protocol that establishes secure communication channels between devices, encrypting data with a one time symmetric key that is securely exchanged per session. Enhanced WPS alleviates the WPS security issues and enables the user to have full control over the procedure, raising user confidence. © 2012 IEEE.