A Proposed Model for Enhanced Security against Key Reinstallation Attack on Wireless Networks

Wireless network security is advancing consistently. This progress can be easily seeing by recounting the success stories achieved through the years since the modification of its first security protocol, WEP; then the WPA and finally the WPA2. The Wireless Protocol Access Pre-Shared Key (WPA2-PSK) mode is usually adopted by Small Office Home Office (SOHO) environments as it does not require a costly investment on a dedicated authentication system. Nevertheless, despite the fact that this mode was improved consistently, the core part (4-way handshake) still presents several vulnerabilities such as the key reinstallation attack (KRACK) which was discovered by Vanhoef and Piessens in 2016 and published in October, 2017. Here, we proposed an enhanced model which involved a Boolean variable that switches from true to false once the Key is installed; also, we include handshake messages encryption with Pair-wise Master Key as the encryption/decryption key, using Advance Encryption Standard (AES). Results obtained from the simulations of the enhanced model were compared with that of the existing model. The message execution time measured in micro seconds shows that the proposed model is more efficient than the existing four-way handshake model and it prevent the reinstallation of the Pair-wise Master key (PTK) during the handshake process.