A blockchain-based authentication protocol for WLAN mesh security access

In order to deploy a secure WLAN mesh network, authentication of both users and APs is needed, and a secure authentication mechanism should be employed. However, some additional configurations of trusted third party agencies are still needed on-site to deploy a secure authentication system. This paper proposes a new block chain-based authentication protocol for WLAN mesh security access, to reduce the deployment costs and resolve the issues of requiring key delivery and central server during IEEE 802.11X authentication. This method takes the user’s authentication request as a transaction, considers all the authentication records in the mesh network as the public ledger and realizes the effective monitoring of the malicious attack. Finally, this paper analyzes the security of the protocol in detail, and proves that the new method can solve the dependence of the authentication node on PKI and CA.