FPGA implementation of RC-4T and WPA

Abstract

Security is an important feature to be included in the field of wireless communications, where the transmission and reception need to be unassailable. Every wireless device needs to adopt a security model which may be complex or simple to make the communication impregnable. The algorithm to be chosen for the final implementation depends on the characteristics of the device. Applications requiring higher security should employ devices having computational capabilities and good amount of hardware and those applications that do not need to have tight security can compromise with the hardware resources and the ability of the micro-controller/microprocessor. In this work two security models namely, the RC-4 with the Toeplitz hash algorithm (RC-4T) and the Wi-Fi protected Access (WPA) have been compared in terms of hardware complexity and combinational delay. Both of these algorithms have been implemented using the XilinxVirtex-6q FPGA device for the comparison based on resource utilization and delays. Toeplitz hash function has been used along with RC-4 algorithm for the generation of the key stream thus making the security model more robust as compared to the traditional WEP.