A secure communication over wireless environments by using a data connection core
Recently, wireless networks, such as Wi-Fi and 3G, have been widely equipped and popularly used in the world. People holding smart devices can conveniently access the Internet services through modern wireless networks. However, when people are enjoying using wireless systems, network security has been a crucial challenge because wireless messages, encrypted or unencrypted, may be maliciously intercepted by hackers. After analyzing and/or decrypting the messages, hackers can illegally capture or steal important information, such as credit card numbers or usernames/passwords, carried in the messages. Currently, SSL and IPsec are utilized to protect the delivery of these types of information. However, each of the two security protocols has its own drawbacks both in their key exchange and message encryption/decryption processes. To solve these drawbacks, in this paper, we propose a secure communication system, named the Wireless Security System with Data Connection Core (WiSDC for short), which consists of two security schemes, including a symmetric key exchange process and a two-dimensional stream cipher mechanism. The former employs random numbers and the connection keys contained in the Data Connection Core (the DCC for short) to generate internal keys, through which the security level of the key exchange process can be enhanced. Here, the DCC is a set of random numbers created when the underlying user registers himself/herself with the wireless system being considered, and the random numbers are only known to the user and AAA server of the wireless system. The latter invokes two operators, including exclusive-or circle plus and binary adder +(2) operators, and two Pseudo Random Number Sequences (PRNSs) to encrypt plaintext so as to well protect the ciphertext. The WiSDC also adopts a pseudo random number generator, which feeds back keys in current stage as a part of the inputs of the next stage, to generate more complicated keys for data encryption. Experimental results show that the WiSDC can effectively protect transmitted messages for wireless environments. The analytical results indicate that the WiSDC has higher security level and execution efficiency than those of the SSL and IPsec. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
data connection core wi-fi 3g two-dimensional stream cipher internal key pseudo random number generator