2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The demand for high speed and secure wireless local area network (WLAN) continues to grow exponentially. As a result, the Wi-Fi technology continues to evolve to meet the needs of both the enterprise and home network environments. Wireless security has been a special area of interest to users, vendors and researchers. One of the most important and recent advancement is the introduction of WPA3 personal and enterprise to address some of the serious vulnerability issues of WPA2/WPA. Ensuring that wireless security curriculum up to date has been a challenge due to the reluctance of the Access Point (AP) and Wireless Station/Client STA) vendors to implement WPA3 in their currently affordable products. Also, it has been a challenge to be able to access information from the vendors products to develop and deliver practical and robust lab exercises on the cryptographic algorithms specified in the WPA3 personal and enterprise standard.

In this paper, we present our solution to address these challenges where we adopted the approach of creating our own affordable, customizable and flexible wireless access point and wireless stations/clients. These customizable wireless components are created using open source software running on the affordable Raspberry Pi 3B units. The RPi-3B units must be equipped with USB wireless adaptors with wireless chips that support WPA3 protocols and requirements. The open source software packages adopted in our solution are the Linux wpa supplicant (wireless station/supplicant), hostapd (access point/authenticatior) and freeradius (authentication server) latest releases.

In this paper, we present the results of using this customizable, upgradable, and affordable solution. We also share how we were able to develop and deliver a well thought-out, thoroughly tested and well-received by the students lab exercises on the latest wireless security algorithms (such as SAE/Dragonfly based on NIST elliptical curve cryptography). In these lab exercises, the students are provided with python script implementation of some of the algorithm and asked to create their own for others. We also provide the students with a validation methodology that we developed that enable them to extract the input ingredients required by and the target output expected from the security algorithm scripts.