Wireless Network Security Issues - Report Example

Techniques such as Wired Equivalent Privacy, or WEP, are easy to support and implement but be trivial to circumvent through widely available techniques (Bangeman, p. 1). The newer Wi-Fi Protected Access, or WPA, and its extension WPA2 have shown themselves to be much more secure than WEP, but are unsupported by many early 802.11 devices.

More traditional means of security are also commonly employed with wireless networking. Minimizing the range of a wireless network past its range of use helps minimize unintended access, as it only allows devices that have been specifically authorized. As with all security, one must take care to balance ease of use and convenience with preventing unauthorized access or use. This paper will look at the most common types of wireless network security, as well as the relative level of support and steps involved in implementation.

At the lowest level, computer networking is made up of pieces of data, known as packets. Each packet contains a header stating its destination and the type of data it contains, with the remainder of the packet occupied by the actual data that is being transmitted. Wireless networking operates by the same concept, transmitting packets between two devices. Though the concept is simple, many different ways to accomplish it were created, with different solutions almost always being incompatible.

After many years of various vendor-specific solutions, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, or the IEEE, began to look into creating a unified standard for wireless networking in the mid-1990s. IEEE created the 802.11 specification, which describes how wireless short-range communications should be carried out over the 2.5ghz, 3.4ghz, and 5ghz frequencies. The maximum supported data rate described by 802.11 is 2 megabits/second. The specification failed to become widely adopted and is now unsupported.

The first widely adopted amendment to 802.11 was 802.11b. 802.11b was completed in 1999 and amended in 2001 and is still commonly used and supported thanks to the backward compatibility of future amendments to the 802.11 specifications. 802.11b, though prone to interference, includes a variety of methods such as data rate throttling to gracefully handle interference (802.11b-1999 6). 802.11b also supports 11 channels at 25mhz intervals, minimizing interference in areas with a high density of networks. 802.11b supports a theoretical rate limit of 11 megabits/second, although 5 megabits/second is a more reasonable estimate of actual speed when real-world interference is introduced (802.11b-1999 11).

The next major amendment to 802.11 was 802.11g, which was completed in 2003 and is the most commonly used wireless networking technology as of 2009. 802.11g represented a shift in technique for the 802.11 standards, switching to the use of Orthogonal frequency-division multiplexing, or OFDM, for its modulation (802.11g-2003 10). Earlier versions of the protocols used Complementary Code Keying, or CCK, a technology that while error resistant required the serial transmissions of all data (802.11b-1999 16). OFDM multiplexes the spectrum allowing for data to be sent in parallel and increasing the overall speed of transmission. 802.11g supports CCK and will fall back to it when an 802.11b client connects to an 802.11g network (802.11g-2003 13). CCK is also more interference-resistant, so 802.11g will also revert to CCK in cases of high interference.