Social WiFI Authentication

Ross Nordstrom
University of Colorado - Colorado Springs
CS 5910 - Computer/Network Security
December 2014

Abstract

Wireless network authentication techniques have been greatly studied and improved over the past two decades, but they all suffer from the human factor. A common problem in computer and network security is ensuring the people interacting with it do not introduce security holes. Residential and small business networks are an example of an area where security is very important but not well understood. The simple fact is that the algorithm keeping wireless networks is of no use if the network owner uses insecure passwords, or insecure practices in keeping those passwords a secret.

In this paper I investigate the use of OAuth for authenticating and managing authorization of wireless networks. By using OAuth, we can frame the authentication scheme to match users' mental model of access control. OAuth, through integration with Google+ or Facebook, let's network owners manage access to their network more intuitively by simplifying the concept to a matter of managing a list of people in a group. In addition to improving access control, authenticating with OAuth removes the need for passwords and the insecurities introduced from them in residential and small business wireless networks.

Contents

The major contribution of this repository is the /proposal folder, containing my project proposal and some LaTex scripting for generating it. The source code I used and created is also available in the other folders.