EAP-PSK
The EAP Pre-Shared Key authentication protocol, like the other EAP types discussed thus far, can be used for providing authentication services to entities in a wireless network.
The Pre-Shared Key refers to a key or secret that needs to be derived and shared by the parties by some mechanism before the EAP-PSK conversation takes place. The security provided by EAP-PSK will be compromised if this secret key is exposed. Note that EAP-PSK is different from the Pre-shared Key authentication mode used in Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA). The WPA implementation is commonly known as WPA-PSK.
EAP-PSK is a simpler in its design and in the way it functions when compared to EAP-TLS or EAP-TTLS. This simplicity is due to the fact that it does not use asymmetric cryptography as the other two do. This same simplicity also means that EAP-PSK cannot offer some of the advanced security features of the others.
Under the hood, EAP-PSK uses the AES symmetric block cipher.
In this tutorial:
- Securing Wireless Networks
- Security Background
- Security Services
- Cryptographic Concepts and Terms
- Encryption and Decryption
- Keyspace
- Exclusive OR (XOR)
- Algorithm
- Asymmetric Encryption Algorithms
- Public-Private Key Cryptography
- Cipher
- Concealment Ciphers vs. Running Key Ciphers
- Stream Ciphers vs. Block Ciphers
- Cipher Examples
- Cipher Implementations
- Wi-Fi Protected Access
- TKIP/WPA
- Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2)
- CCMP/AES
- Hash Functions
- EAP
- EAP Entities
- EAP Grammar
- EAP Types
- EAP-TTLS
- EAP-PSK
- EAP-SIM
- EAP-AKA
- IEEE 802.11i
- Four-Way Handshake
- IEEE 802.11i Considerations
