Wireless Network Diagram

How To Make A Security Enabled Wireless Network

Communication is an important aspect of our lives. We communicate for personal as well as professional purposes. Thus a security enabled wireless network is a call for today. Today we need a system that is secured from unauthorized users and this is the key factor in setting up a communication system.

How? Security is of major concern in wireless network systems. It is important to install Security Enabled Wireless Networks, or else anybody who is equipped with a receiver can access the wireless signals. Security breaches in wireless networks were not common when the technology was originally introduced.

In a short time, however, as the technology became popular and came to be used in multiple fields, crackers started looking for means to break the signals and access data on these wireless networks. What helped these crackers were the faults in security and little knowledge of the technology by people who employed it. The risk associated with the protocols and encryption methods were also some factors that compromised the security of wireless networks..

Evaluating these areas and types of unauthorized access to networks, the security risks are classified in to the following categories:

* Accidental associations to the network This means that a nearby companys overlapping network might accidentally receive another's wireless signals. The person whose signals that get trapped is not even aware of this fact.

* Malicious associations to the wireless network When a cracker develops a soft Access Point to intentionally get access to a network's data in order to manipulate or destroy it, it is termed as a malicious association. Layer 3 protection like network authentication or virtual private networks are not enough tools to protect against such security breaches. 802.1x authentication may ofter some resistance but but even their scope is limited.

* Networks known as Ad-hoc networks, also called peer to peer networks, are a threat for wireless networks because they do not require an access point. In this case, encryption methods can be employed to provide security.

* MAC spoofing is a type of security threat wherein the cracker is able to listen to the network traffic and can make access to the MAC address of the computer. MAC filtering and Network Sniffing are the measures to avoid MAC spoofing.

A good security enabled wireless network system is the one that uses a number of security measures to ensure that intruders do not find their way in inside a wireless network. Various security measures are: * MAC ID filtering * Static IP addressing method * WEP, Wireless Equivalence Privacy * WPA and WPA 2 * LEAP method * 802.1 x method * PEAP

Thus, a security enabled wireless system will employ a combination of the above mentioned methods to safeguard a wireless network from any kind of security leakage.