Wireless Network Authentication and Tracking Protocol based on Visible Light Communication

Abstract

Wi-Fi has paved path to introduction of several wireless communication protocols and ecosystem of various kinds of wireless devices like IOT and BYOD which have many advantages as well as security vulnerabilities inherent to them which may expose organizations to threats. Since most of these technologies use Access Points to serve connectivity for their clients/users they can be accessed from several meters away from the Access Point which serves the connectivity and since these technologies are wireless they can be easily manipulated and misused. Visible Light Communication (VLC) is a blooming research area which uses visible light spectrum as the communication channel. Exponential growth of Light Emitting Diode (LED) technology and deployment as a light source has encouraged to use them for communication purposes as well. With the introduction of VLC, LED can be used for communication while providing the primary function of illumination. Since location-based network access protocols have not been implemented for Wi-Fi devices, this research has been conducted with the intention of using VLC to perform location-based authentication. In the proposed location authentication protocol, VLC and Infrared(IR) technologies had been used for authentication purpose and Wi-Fi is used for data transfer once the device had been authenticated. The proposed protocol provides location-based connectivity to Wi-Fi devices with minimum changes to Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service (RADIUS) and Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2) protocol by using VLC and IR. In this proposed authentication protocol key distribution and authentication are done through VLC and IR. With this approach the network connectivity will be inherently restricted to the devices which are in the visible range of the Access Point(AP) VLC device (LED) which transmits the timely key and client devices can send responses to AP requests using IR with directed signaling. The Visible Light and IR are incapable of penetrating through walls and that feature had been used here for providing location based access to the Wi-Fi network and tracking capabilities with secureness.