Security concerns continue to take center stage in the wireless local-area networking (WLAN) sector. With adoption of wireless LAN (WLAN) systems continuing to increase, the threat of people sniffing in on these networks grows. And with the world in an uproar, . . .
Security concerns continue to take center stage in the wireless local-area networking (WLAN) sector. With adoption of wireless LAN (WLAN) systems continuing to increase, the threat of people sniffing in on these networks grows. And with the world in an uproar, corporations, IT managers, and even end users are demanding better security functionality in 802.11-compliant systems.

Despite efforts by the IEEE 802.11 committee, major enhancements still have not occurred in the WLAN sector. In fact, the wireless medium is so open to attacks that today's WLAN networks can be accessed by using a laptop and an empty can of pringles chips (or a coffee can). This is not so surprising once you think about it. The pringles can acts as an antenna (amazingly it provides a gain of up to 15 dB) providing a "tap" (a wireless network scanner/sniffer) into the medium. Once the laptop gets access to the packets flowing through the network, it is an open world from there on.

In order to stop rogue attacks, such as the Pringles example above, WLAN designers must act today and build higher levels of security into their system architectures. This three-part tutorial is designed to help out.

The link for this article located at Comms Design is no longer available.