Wireless networks are becoming more and more popular. In current wireless network environments, mobile users can use multiple wireless network interfaces built in their mobile devices to roam around the mobile networks. They can scan the wireless spectrums and utilize the network resources extremely, and they can roam into nearby wireless networks due to the mobility capabilities of the powerful mobile devices. Before connecting to an access point, an authentication process is necessary. There are many interactive wireless authentication protocols which have been proposed in the literature. Under the wireless networks, handover is an important property for a mobile user to change her/his position. However, the existing interactive wireless authentication protocols may cause unstable connection. This is because that a mobile user may perform failed authentications with some nearby invalid access points and thus she/he cannot finish handover in time. Hence, we would like to design a mechanism for a mobile user to determine the validity of access points before the interactive authentication, and the mobile user can choose a valid one when making handover. In our proposed scheme, the mobile user can just scan and receive authentication messages from access points without interactions with them while she/he can determine which one of them is valid. We call this cognitive authentication. Besides, we also propose cooperative defense which allows mobile users to exchange their received authentication messages for detecting illegal access points. Finally, we provide security proofs for our proposed scheme.

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