Securing Wireless LAN

Securing Your Wireless LAN
By Jonathan Coupal

Introduction

It has become common practice to deploy wireless networks for convenience applications requiring users to be mobile. Also many "road warriors" have Wi-Fi accounts that let them access the Internet and the corporate network from remote locations. Furthermore, many deploy Wi-Fi at home to avoid the difficulties of wiring the home. But because wireless networks operate by broadcasting a radio signal between nodes, they are especially vulnerable to hackers and abuse.

Wired equivalent privacy (WEP) has been used in the past to secure wireless LANs. However, WEP has significant weaknesses, most notably that it uses encryption keys that are both static and known by stations across the network, and it uses a weak implementation of the encryption algorithm. Thus, it is important that wireless networks be protected by the new generation of security features now available.

Advanced Wireless Security Features

IT personnel have a number of available options to make their wireless networks more secure than they are using WEP:

· The Wi-Fi Alliance has developed Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA), which is a standards-based security technology based on the IEEE 802.1X standard. It is free and built into both Windows XP and Macintosh OS/X. Any equipment with the Wi-Fi Alliance sticker is assured to support WPA. WPA2, implementing IEEE 802.11i, has been released, so users of WPA should plan on a migration as equipment using the new standard becomes available.