10 - WLAN Risk and Threat Mitigation

Abstract

This chapter provides the tools and techniques necessary to protect the network against cyberadversaries. The Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP) is a replacement for Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) in the 802.11i specification for wireless network security. WEP is a flawed security protocol that is part of the 802.11 standard. TKIP includes several features that eliminate the risks present in the current version of WEP. A hashed Initialization Vector (IV) is added to the WEP key. This becomes the session key used to encrypt traffic and to help protect against sniffing exploits that can allow attackers to eavesdrop connections and impersonate legitimate stations. TKIP has also added the ability to generate dynamic keys to help protect against brute force key-cracking attacks, which are sometimes used against static keys found in WEP. The chapter provides an overview of the WEP and TKIP protocols. It describes how TKIP addresses the weaknesses in WEP and when and how to use TKIP and WEP.