Security in Wireless Protocols Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Security in Wireless Protocols - Essay Example Some of these risks are similar to those of wired networks; some are aggravated by wireless connectivity; some are new. The important basis of risks in wireless networks is that the medium, the atmosphere, is open to all including the malicious intruders. Maintaining a secure wireless network is a continuous task that needs better effort than that needed for other networks and systems (Karygiannis and Owens, 2002). 802.11 standards: The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in the year 1997 created the first WLAN standard and it was named 802.11. However, soon the disadvantage of using 802.11 came up and it was found that 802.11 only supported a maximum network bandwidth of 2 Mbps. As a result the data transfer was too slow for most applications (Mitchell, 2008). Concerning the security aspect, 802.11 use the shared secret key and this in turn helps a hacker decrypting any of the 802.11 frames. Normally 802.11 dont supply any functions that support the exchange of keys among stations. Because of that, system administrators and users usually use the same keys for weeks and even months together. This gives malicious offenders ample of time to observe and hack into WEP-enabled networks (Geier, 2002). The IEEE 802.11 specification recognized many services to offer a safe operating background. The protection services are offered mainly by the Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) protoc ol to secure link-level data during wireless transmission between clients and access points. WEP does not provide total security, except only for the wireless portion of the connection. RC4-based stream encryption algorithm is used for confidentiality, verification, and integrity (Karygiannis and Owens, 2002). 802.11b: As the technology advanced IEEE expanded on the original 802.11 standard in July 1999 and created the 802.11b specification. It was found that 802.11b supports high bandwidth up to 11 Mbps when compared to traditional Ethernet. Similar to 802.11, 802.11b