Chapter 8 - Wireless lan security

Abstract

This chapter summarizes the range of generic security measures that have been developed to protect wireless local area network (WLAN) from threats and vulnerabilities. Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) provides enhanced protection from targeted attacks. It uses the temporal key integrity protocol (TKIP) for key management and offers a choice of either the 802.1x authentication framework together with extensible authentication protocol (EAP) for enterprise WLAN security or a simpler pre-shared key (PSK) authentication for the home or small office network, which does not have an authentication server. IEEE 802.1x is an access-control protocol that provides protection to networks by authenticating users. After successful authentication, a virtual port is opened on the access point for network access, while communications are blocked if authentication fails. The 802.1x authentication defines three elements: the supplicant, the authenticator, and the authentication server. The standard defines how the extensible authentication protocol (EAP) is used by the Data Link layer to pass authentication information between the supplicant and the authentication server.