Sustainable and Practical Firmware Upgrade for Wireless Access Point Using Password-Based Authentication

Jaejin Jang and Im Y. Jung
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Jaejin Jang: School of Electronics Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 41566, Korea
Im Y. Jung: School of Electronics Engineering, Kyungpook National University, Daegu 41566, Korea

Sustainability, 2016, vol. 8, issue 9, 1-17

Abstract: Wireless access points (WAPs) are devices that provide Internet connectivity to devices such as desktops, laptops, smartphones, and tablets. Hence, it is important to provide sufficient availability to devices and security for the traffic that is routed by a WAP. However, attackers can decrease the network bandwidth or obtain the traffic including private data such as search histories, login information, and device usage patterns by exploiting the vulnerabilities in firmware upgrades to install malicious firmware. To address this problem, we propose a sustainable and practical firmware upgrade for a WAP using password-based authentication. The proposed upgrade protocol ensures security by adding freshness to the firmware whenever a firmware upgrade occurs. This freshness is different for each event and each firmware; therefore, even if the freshness of one firmware is exposed, the others are secure. In addition, confidentiality, integrity, and authentication are ensured. Furthermore, the proposed protocol can be easily implemented and adapted to WAPs. Experiments are performed to evaluate the upgrade time, resource usage, and code size in wired and wireless connected environments by implementing a prototype and analyzing the security of the protocol. The results show that the proposed upgrade is secure and practical.

Keywords: practical firmware upgrade; password-based authentication; sustainable wireless access points (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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