Analyzing the Impact of Security Protocols on Wireless LAN with Multimedia Applications Thaier Hayajneh, Samer Khasawneh, Bassam Jamil, Awni Itradat Department of Computer Engineering Hashemite University Zarqa, Jordan {Thaier, Samerkh, Bassam, Itradat}@hu.edu.jo Abstract—The availability and reasonable cost of broadband Internet made it an attractive and favorable option to billions of users worldwide. Being a fast service also encourages its users to use multimedia applications. The performance of such applications in wireless LAN may be highly affected by security protocols. This paper examines the effect of different security protocols on the performance of wireless LAN with multimedia applications. Experiments were performed on a wireless test-bed and the results were analyzed for throughput, delay and jitter for four security settings: disabled security, WEP, WPA1, and WAP2. The experiments were performed under two different scenarios and using multimedia traffic streams. The results revealed a significant degradation in performance when security protocols were enabled in wireless LAN. Specifically, delay and jitter, were significantly increased, both of which are key metrics for multimedia applications. The increase is clearer when a larger number of hosts exist in the network. We finally propose an outline for a solution to obtain strong security in wireless LAN without significant performance degradation. The solution proposes that the security processing at the hosts be conducted by the powerful host processor rather than by the radio card processor. As for the wireless access point, adding ASIC or FPGA processor is suggested for performing the heavy security processing. Keywords-WLAN; WEP; WPA1; WPA2; delay; jitter; multimedia traffic. I. INTRODUCTION In the last decade, wireless local area networks (WLAN) technology has become more convenient and thus has spread extensively worldwide. The security of this technology, however, is a constant concern to all its users, especially those who use it for online banking, social networking, and monetary transfer. In that regard, determining the relationship between the strength of the used security protocol and the performance of WLAN is of utmost importance. This relationship becomes even more important in applications that require high QoS to operate properly such as video conferencing and live video streaming. Researchers have extensively investigated the impact of security protocols on the performance of WLAN. The majority focused on the network’s throughput while less attention was given to delay. The results were conflicting on the impact of security on the performance of WLAN, with several [1, 2, 3, 6, 7] discussing its tangible negative impact and few concluding its negligible impact on performance of WLAN [5]. The main security protocols in WLAN are wired equivalent privacy (WEP) [8], WiFi protected access (WPA1) [10], and WiFi protected access II (WPA2) [10]. WEP is the simplest and uses computationally light cipher. However, it has been shown to be insecure and should no longer be used. WPA1 is stronger than WEP; but, has few security vulnerabilities and was replaced by WPA2 [11]. WPA2 is known to be secure since it relies on strong cipher as AES. Hence, applying WPA2 is expected to be heavy and requires considerable processing leading to increased delay. Further details will be discussed on each protocol in Section 3. In this paper, we will examine the impact of security protocols on the performance of WLAN through conducting experiments over a test-bed. The performance of the network was examined under four conditions: disabled security, WEP, WPA1, and WPA2. Given the contemporary trend of using multimedia applications among current Internet users, a special attention was given in this paper to the impact of security protocols on the performance of WLAN in such applications. Since the multimedia applications are most sensitive to delay and jitter, these two performance metrics were the focus in this paper. Moreover, we have proposed a new solution that will allow us to use a strong security protocol in WLAN while significantly minimizing the degradation in WLAN performance. The solution proposes that the security processing be conducted by the powerful host processors instead of the radio card processors. As for the wireless access point, adding ASIC or FPGA processor is suggested for performing heavy security processing. The need for such a proposition arose from the fact that disabled security WLAN by far outperforms other security settings in all performance aspects. Our work is different from pervious studies in considering different security protocols including WPA2 and different multimedia traffic (video streaming traffic); focusing on delay and jitter; and finally proposing a novel solution to achieve strong security without performance degradation. The consequent parts of this paper are organized as follows: Section 2 overviews previous related work. Section 3 provides a brief description of the security protocols and their pitfalls in WLAN. Methodology and the hardware/software used in the experiments are discussed in Section 4, and results are described in Section 5. Section 6 illustrates the proposed solution, and the derived conclusion and future work are summarized in Section 7. 169 Copyright (c) IARIA, 2012. ISBN: 978-1-61208-209-7 SECURWARE 2012 : The Sixth International Conference on Emerging Security Information, Systems and Technologies