Evaluation of EAP Authentication Methods in Wired and Wireless Networks

Abstract: In any networking environment, security, connection time and scalability of the network are the major concerns to keep network safe, faster and stable. Administrators working within the networking environment need to have complete account of manageability, scalability and security of the network, so that the organizational data can be kept confidential and maintain integrity. There are different authentication methods used by network administrators for accessing network in wired and wireless environments. As network usage and attacks on network increases, a secure, scalable and standard network protocol is needed for accessing and to keep data safe in both wired and wireless networks. IEEE 802.1x is an IEEE standard used to provide authentication and authorization to the devices over LAN/WLAN. The framework IEEE 802.1x uses EAP for authentication and authorization with a RADIUS server. In this report, an experimental analysis for different EAP authentication methods in both wired and wireless networks in terms of authentication time and the total processing time is presented. Wireshark is used to capture the network traffic on server and client ends. After analyzing each packet timestamps that are captured using Wireshark, it is seen that EAP-MD5 takes less time in both wired and wireless networks, if the number of users increases, there is not much difference in the network connection time. Concerning with security of the network, EAP-MD5 is vulnerable to many attacks so it is not used by many companies. The alternative methods with their strengths and weaknesses are discussed.