Computer Security and Privacy in Wireless Local Area Network in Nigeria

Abstract

The advent of wireless computing and massive processing power available within portable devices provides organizations with an unprecedented ability to provide flexible computing services on-demand to enable business initiatives and this development has increased the demand for wireless network security, which if unaddressed enables the theft of data, lowers productivity, and causes quantifiable financial losses. Flaws arising from wireless protocol with networking design and implementation errors present challenges to the Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi) community of users. In this paper, we attempt to document and classify the flaws in Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS), then proving the existence of this flaw with a WPS Pin Cracking Method, and presenting a Reverse Engineering countermeasure to eliminating WPS from an Access Point firmware, including other recommendations to helping the network administrators not repeat the errors that are the root causes of flaws of wireless networking in general from being exploited. By implementing the various techniques discussed in this paper, a better and more secure wireless network will be developed.