Wireless Network Technology

Introduction

Wireless network technology is the fastest rising sector of the communications market. An organization is adopting wireless networking technologies to address networking requirements in ever-increasing numbers (Whitman, ME & Mattord, HJ 2005). Wireless networks have demonstrated their ability to deliver increased productivity, convenience and freedom of movement to users and network installation flexibility to IT staff in organizations. As a result of wireless networks computer users have become more mobile. There is no need for users to be near the connection point to use internet (Solms, BV & Marais, E 2004). However, wireless technology also generates new threats and alters the existing information security risk profile. It is crucial to secure a wireless network if we want to avoid the unauthorized users from accessing our data and downloading materials. These days stealing of data and assets through the internet have become very frequent. So, it is important to secure the wireless network by utilizing small time to be saved in future. The security of wireless networks becomes more vital because it is most commonly used in every field. There are number of practices developed for securing wireless networks till now and because of the scope, and its importance, more research is being done for more secure wireless networks in future ( Solms, BV & Marais, E 2004).

Wireless Network Security

1. Wireless Networking Basics

According to (Vacca, JR 2006) The term wireless networking means the technology that facilitates two or more computers to communicate using standard network protocols, but without network cabling. It was not a long time ago that computers were a luxury rather than a necessity. Having compu...

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...network server are kept by KDC.

4.5 PEAP, LEAP and EAP

PEAP is developed by RSA security, Cisco and Microsoft. PEAP allow safe data transfer, transport of encryption keys and passwords without involving certificate from server. PEAP is designed to protect EAP communication between clients and authenticators. LEAP is the lightweight Extensible Authentication Protocol. It is based on 802.1X and to reduce original security faults it makes use of WEP and a sensitive key management system. LEAP is very safe in contrast to EAP-MD5.It is prone to cracking. There are some crackers for breaking LEAP such as THC-Leap cracker, Anwrap and Asleared (Rittinghouse, JW & Ransome, JF 2004). LEAP presented a convenient way to make certain mutual authentication among a client and a RADIUS server when authentication standards for use in wireless environments were still evolving quick