Networking / Beginners

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.

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In this tutorial:

  1. Securing Wireless Networks
  2. Security Background
  3. Security Services
  4. Cryptographic Concepts and Terms
  5. Encryption and Decryption
  6. Keyspace
  7. Exclusive OR (XOR)
  8. Algorithm
  9. Asymmetric Encryption Algorithms
  10. Public-Private Key Cryptography
  11. Cipher
  12. Concealment Ciphers vs. Running Key Ciphers
  13. Stream Ciphers vs. Block Ciphers
  14. Cipher Examples
  15. Cipher Implementations
  16. Wi-Fi Protected Access
  17. TKIP/WPA
  18. Wi-Fi Protected Access 2 (WPA2)
  19. CCMP/AES
  20. Hash Functions
  21. EAP
  22. EAP Entities
  23. EAP Grammar
  24. EAP Types
  25. EAP-TTLS
  26. EAP-PSK
  27. EAP-SIM
  28. EAP-AKA
  29. IEEE 802.11i
  30. Four-Way Handshake
  31. IEEE 802.11i Considerations