22-08-2014, 09:51 AM
Wireless LAN has been popular due to its flexibility, mobility and lower cost of installation. There has been the need of secure communication. Because of air as transmission medium it has to encounter various security threats. The various types of security attacks are traffic analysis and eavesdropping, MAC spoofing and Session hijacking and other higher level of security attacks. Among the different approaches for the security, Encryption of data is one. Encryption of data has been used for the confidentiality. Encryption algorithms are known to be computationally intensive. Those encryption algorithms’ so far implemented in wireless technology have higher security level which are computationally intensive. And those which are lesser computationally intensive they have lower security level. They consume a significant amount of computing resources such as CPU time, memory, and battery power. Thus there has always been compromise between either energy consumption or security level. A wireless device, usually with very limited resources, especially battery power, is subject to the problem of energy consumption due to encryption algorithms. Thus there is always challenge in implementation of encryption algorithm in wireless LAN. Various security encryption algorithms that are commonly used in WLAN are RC4 and AES. The results of experiments with AES and RC4, two symmetric key algorithms used in WLANs are compared to analyze the challenges on their implementation and their suitability for WLAN.