ZKP protocol for safe Wi-Fi access

Wireless communication has recently evolved as a real time and high-rated data communication
medium. It is the transfer of information between two or more points that are not connected by
an electrical conductor or are not wired. The number of wireless devices being opted to carry out
illicit cybercriminal activities such as system hacking, data forging, financial information threat,
malicious attacks etc has been increased. Undoubtedly it causes a large amount of loss and
therefore it is of paramount importance to improve the wireless communication security in order
to fight back and secure the use of wireless networks. The importance of Cryptography in
protecting the confidentiality of data transmission does improves the achievable communication
security level along with the incorporation of multiple authentication approaches but still it needs
to be enhanced. Thus, for user authentication, validation and data transfer Zero Knowledge Proof
acts as a self-authenticated interactive protocol. ZKP eliminates the use of secure service
infrastructures such as symmetric or asymmetric key encryption mechanisms also the central
authority based authentication protocols. It proves to help mitigate the possible attacks while reauthentication
and network service sharing.

Anything that may increase the danger of confidentiality of secret being revealed by an intruder
has to be eliminated. Zero Knowledge Authentication is a protocol that takes place between two
parties called the Prover and the Verifier. The Prover has to simply prove the other party called
as Verifier that it knows the password for authentication without telling it. Such a interaction is
designed not to give or reveal any secret and thus after a couple of messages getting interchanged
the Verifier can only know that the Prover does or doesn't possess the password. It is often
necessary to come up with a potentially difficult to break encryption mechanism to encrypt the
messages. Hence the use of one such encryption and decryption algorithm for passwords in ZKP
authentication protocol proves to be cryptographically strong and difficult to break.

MSC CS 2016-2018 INT Dr. Elizabeth Sherly