Wireless Security

There is much debate around the security of wireless networks. The three main issues are:

1. Access to wireless networks
2. Securing/encrypting data during transmission
3. Protecting network resources from hacking

Access to wireless networks

This is a policy or acceptable use issue. Who do you want to let in?

• Do you want students, parents, patrons to be able sit in their cars in the parking lot and hop onto the internet via your wireless network?
• Do you want library patrons to bring their personal laptops into your library and access your network and resources?
• Do you want to be an advertised HotSpot?

You can password protect your wireless network by requiring usernames and passwords.
You can require library patrons to "register laptops" and obtain a password to hop onto your network.

Is your mission or goal to provide free access? Protect your bandwidth?

This boils down to whether you require people to authenticate in some way to access your wireless network and what you provide access to via this network.

Securing/encrypting data

Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) is a security protocol used to provide wireless encryption for the 802.11b standard. It was designed to provide a wireless local area network (WLAN) with a level of security and privacy comparable to what is usually expected of a wired LAN. There is a lot of discussion surrounding how good a job WEP does. Most people don't even enable the encryption on their wireless devices. It is security versus convenience of access. Most wireless cards have built in WEP 128 bit encryption cards offer a higher level of encryption but are more expensive. Wireless Access Points that use WEP require a Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) key

Protecting network resources from hacking

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