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Top1. Introduction
Wireless communications are, by any measure, the communications industry's fastest increasing segment. As such, it caught the media's attention and the public's imagination. Cellular systems have witnessed exponential growth and around two billion customers globally presently exist (Abbas, 2005; Adegbemile 2007; Adeyinka et al., 2007). The International Telecommunications Union (ITU) statistics reveal that (AirDefense 2017) globally there are more than 6 billion phone subscribers and more than 40% of the world's inhabitants have access to the Internet. Wireless communications are defined by the writers in (Zou et al., 2016) and (Rashid et al., 2009) as transmitting message signals via low-energy radio frequency waves using open air, a transmitter, and a media receiver. The message signal is transferred to the nearest antenna site and delivered to another wireless phone via optic fiber cable or radio signal. Wireless networks’ open nature makes wireless transmissions highly susceptible to multiple intruders malicious assaults. This varies from denial-of-service attacks, scrutiny of information interception, identity theft, infringement of privacy rights, insertion of viruses or malicious codes to interrupt lawful transmissions, and interference with attacks. In addition, intruders may disable firewall security to obtain access to delicate data transferred between two wireless systems if strong encryption does not protect such data well. Therefore, the need to enhance the safety of wireless communication in order to combat cyber-criminal operations, as more individuals use wireless networks such as cellular networks and Wi-Fi for online banking and private messages due to the extensive use of smartphones (Rashid et al., 2009). In Foukalas et al.’s (2008) work, we quote that wireless networks usually embrace the open system interconnection (OSI) protocol architecture consisting of the application layer, transport layer, network layer (Jurdak et al., 2004) medium access control (MAC) layer (Takai & Bagrodia 2001) and physical layer (Saradhi & Subramaniam 2009; Wong et al., 2006). Each of these layers of protocol has its own threats and vulnerabilities. Therefore, in order to satisfy the network security requirement, protection should be provided on each network layer; these include authenticity, confidentiality, accessibility and integrity (Rashid et al., 2009). For example, data integrity and confidentiality are accomplished by using cryptographic methods to prevent unauthorized users from disclosing information. To ensure the authenticity of a caller or receiver, current wireless networks traditionally use multiple authentication methods on separate layers of protocols. Some of these methods include authentication of the MAC layer (Aziz & Diffie, 2002), authentication of the network layer (Raju & Akbani 2007; Venkatraman & Agrawal 2000) and authentication of the transport layer (Lashkari et al., 2009). For example, by merely authenticating a user's MAC address, unlawful access to information can be avoided in the MAC layer, whereas Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) and Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) are two frequently used network layer authentication protocols (Rashid et al., 2009; Hole et al., 2005; RFC 2008). In addition, the transport layer security protocols include the safe socket layer (SSL) and the transport layer safety (TLS) (RFC 2006; RFC 1999; Lakshamanan et al., 2008). It is therefore evident that the correct use of various authentication mechanisms can potentially improve wireless network safety. Figure 1 Displays significant wireless safety protocols such as authentication, authorisation and encryption for which other design factors can be supported. It is instructive to remember that the wireless media's broadcast nature (the airwave) makes wireless networks much more susceptible than the respective wired networks to hazards and malicious assaults. Some of these attacks are in the form of eavesdropping data interception (Raymond & Midkiff, 2008), jamming attacks to disrupt legitimate transmissions, identity theft, violation of privacy rights, denial-of-service attacks (Kannhavong et al., 2007), spoofing attack and session hijacking (Meyer & Wetzel, 2004), man-in - the-middle attack (Ohigashi & Morii 2009), message falsification / injection attack (Romero-Zurita et al., 2012), sniffing attack (Kannhavong et al., 2007; Meyer & Wetzel 2004), cafe latte attack (Wei et al., 2011), and traffic redirection (Wei et al., 2011). In order to avoid any confidentiality problems, Elliot (2004) and Chua and Zhang (2006) suggest the use of cryptographic methods to assist preventing wireless transmission eavesdropping.