The IEEE 802.11 wireless standard provides little support for secure access control. As a result, access control in IEEE 802.11 on a per packet basis requires a new and robust identity authentication protocol. The SOLA (Statistical One-Bit Lightweight Authentication) protocol is well suited in a wireless constrained environment because this protocol's communication overhead is extremely low: only one bit. Furthermore, SOLA fulfills the requirements of being secure, useful, cheap, and robust. The synchronization algorithm performs very well. SOLA also makes it easy to develop a framework to detect and respond to, for instance, denial-of-service attacks or an adversary who tries to guess the identity authentication bit for successive packets.