It 242 Week 8 Wlan

In looking at WLAN or wireless LAN we have a difference in authentication right from the start due to the physical connection being radio vs. hard lined into the LAN. In looking at the authentication protocols, they were found to be very weak governing the connections so a few different protocols were established.

The first thing said in discussing security is that there is no end all be all for security which cannot be breached. For a WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) network the access is granted with a key or hexadecimal value which has to be known in order to access the router etc…The types of security mechanisms for WEP or the wired Equivalent Privacy algorithm are fairly weak, there is encryption methods which definitely help the first is Temporal Key Integrity Protocol, and another would be Advanced Encryption Standard. In both of these access is best controlled by using a PSK which is an alpha numeric key known by all users.

With both of these we see that the vulnerabilities are always present. Both TKIP and AES encryption can be accessed with static key cracking, where analysis of captured packets can give up the WEP key and much more personal information. Personnel can avoid their information and systems being accessed by creating longer and more complicated pre shared keys which are harder to crack or take more time. I think with modern security protocols we must have layers i.e. keeping WLAN’s outside the physically accessed areas as a very simple one. Blocking SSID being displayed would be another which can be simple layers placed to deter.