What Is Wireless Security?
WiFi access points, as well as the inclusion of WiFi capability in notebooks, WiFi equipped cell phones, and PDAs, has become commonplace in today's connected world. The ubiquitous inclusion of this technology increases the risk that data might become accessible to uninvited and unwanted snooping. Even more insidious is the risk that your Internet connection could be used, without your permission or knowledge, to commit a crime. During the investigation into the terrorist attack in Mumbai, India, it was learned that the terrorists made use of unsecured WiFi access points to communicate, so as to remain free from eavesdropping.
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History
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In the early days of wireless networking (pre-WiFi), security was largely ignored by the manufacturers, due to the belief that an inherent short range of these devices, as well as the obscurity of the technology, presented little need for additional measures to be taken.
As the technology became more prevalent, and especially in locations where financial or classified information was being transmitted across a wireless network, the need for additional security became more pronounced.
Early Security Attempts
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The first implementation of wireless security used what is known as MAC address filtering. Every network device is provided with a unique numerical designation, known as a MAC address. What this crude form of security did was to allow the wireless access point to identify the MAC address of the connecting device, and be compared with known MAC addresses in an "Allowed" table. The downside of this method is that it is possible for a hacker to "spoof" (replace) the MAC address of their device with the address that is known to be allowed by the access point, which circumvents the security system.
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First Wireless Security Standard
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Once the vulnerabilities of MAC address filtering was discovered, the wireless industry began to take steps to ensure an acceptable level of security was included in these products.
The initial standardization introduced by the WiFi Alliance industry association was known as WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy). Unfortunately, WEP, while certainly capable of keeping the unsophisticated user from gaining access to a network, was actually a flawed standard. In a relatively short period of time, the hacker community had created several tools which allowed anyone with a reasonable amount of computing knowledge to break into WEP-protected networks.
Improved WiFi Security Standards
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The next attempt to create a universal wireless security standard was called WAP (Wi-Fi Protected Access), and while this was an improvement, it was still not suitable for financial transactions or classified data networks. In an attempt to improve WAP security, several additional techniques were employed, including: EAP, LEAP, PEAP and a host of other measures, including VPN (Virtual Private Networking), all of which have been either circumvented, or found to have other disadvantages.
802.11i
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The WiFi standard created to address this issue is the 802.11i designation, and the adoption by the WiFi Alliance is branded as the "WPAv2," which, as of this writing, is considered to be relatively secure.
Please note, only the more recent wireless hardware is capable of supporting this standard.
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