Essay: Wireless Communication

Sample Essay

In most organization, wireless link exist mostly as Wireless LAN or 802.11 standard connections. Since there is not visible link present between two computers that are connected with wireless networking, it is important to ensure strict security in these networks as an unsecured network would allow for any persons to join it, allowing for ease of eavesdropping. There are currently two standards available to secure wireless connections. These are Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) and Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA).

The WEP uses a stream cipher RC4 for adding confidentiality as well as a CRC-32 checksum for the integrity of data.  However, WEP was identified as having major security limitations, due to the fact that its packet could be easily intercepted and the encryption cracked within minutes. Hence WEP was deprecated by Wi-Fi Alliance and was superseded by Wi-Fi Protected Access. WPA improved the weak data encryption of the WEP standard as well as added a new strong user authentication. These were implemented in the from TKIP and 802.11x mechanisms, which allowed for the changing of the encryption keys in the network at much faster rate than they were able to be decrypted. In WPA networks, each network devices is protected by a 256 bit key which can be entered either as a 64 digits hexadecimal string or as a passphrase of 8 to 63 ASCII characters. However, WPA is also vulnerable when operated in pre-shared more in which the encryption key that is used to secure the network is already shared between the entities using a non-secure connection (Valte, 2007).

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