Relationship of the Standards

The next few chapters cover a bewildering number of standards, mostly those of IEEE 802 and IETF (RFCs). The following reference list of all the standards that we mention should help you keep track of these standards and serve as a roadmap to indicate if and where they fit into the RSN picture. You may find you want to refer back here as the picture starts to form in your mind.

List of Standards

Here is a list of all the standards mentioned in Chapters 8 through 12.

Name	Title or Description
IEEE 802.1X	Port access control
IEEE 802.3	Wired LAN
IEEE 802.11	Wireless LAN
IEEE 802.11e	Wireless LAN with Quality or Service Management (in development)
IEEE 802.11i	Wireless LAN Security (in development)
RFC 1321	MD-5 Message Digest Algorithm
RFC 1510	Kerberos V5
RFC 1661	Original PPP standard
RFC 1964	GSSAPI Kerberos Protocol Mechanism
RFC 2058	Earlier RADIUS spec. (superseded)
RFC 2104	Hash Message Authentication Code
RFC 2138	Earlier RADIUS spec. (superseded)
RFC 2246	Transport Layer Security (TLS)
RFC 2284	PPP Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP)
RFC 2548	Microsoft Vendor Specific RADIUS Attributes
RFC 2716	PPP EAP TLS Authentication Protocol
RFC 2743	Generic Security Service Application Programming Interface
RFC 2865	RADIUS
RFC 2866	RADIUS Accounting
RFC 2869	EAP over RADIUS
RFC 2945	The SRP Authentication and Key Exchange System
draft-ietf-pppext-rfc2284bis	Updates EAP
draft-aboba-radius-rfc2869bis	Update to RFC2869
draft-josefsson-pppext-eap-tls-eap	PEAP
draft-haverinen-pppext-eap-sim	GSM-SIM over EAP
Cisco LEAP	Proprietary Vendor protocol for Wi-Fi Security
RC4	Encryption Cipher
AES	Encryption Cipher

Pictorial Map

Figure 7.4 shows a pictorial map of the main standards used in an RSN solution based on TLS authentication. Inevitably the picture is a bit simplistic, but it shows how the TLS authentication process is buried inside a set of standards that provide the communications first between the mobile device and the access point and then between the access point and the authentication server. The links are shown as a set of concentric tubes; the outer tube is the communications medium and successive inner tubes are the encapsulations used to transport the information. As we said at the beginning of this section, we do not expect you to understand the whole picture from looking at Figure 7.4, but we hope it will form a reference point to which you can return.

Figure 7.4. Main Standards in an RSN Solution Based on TLS