Introduction

There is not much indication of anything slowing down the creation and deployment of new technology to the world any time in the near future. With the constant pressure to deploy the latest generation of technology today, little time is allowed for a full and proper security review of the technology and components that make it up.

This rush to deploy, along with the insufficient security review, not only allows age-old security vulnerabilities to be reintroduced to products, but creates new and unknown security challenges as well. Wireless networking is not exempt from this, and like many other technologies, security flaws have been identified and new methods of exploiting these flaws are published regularly.

Utilizing security fundamentals developed over the last few decades, you can review and protect your wireless networks from known and unknown threats. In this chapter, we recall security fundamentals and principles that are the foundation of any good security strategy, addressing a range of issues from authentication and authorization, to controls and audit.

No primer on security would be complete without an examination of the common security standards, which are addressed in this chapter alongside the emerging privacy standards and their implications for the wireless exchange of information.

We also look at how you can maximize the features of existing security standards like Wired Equivalent Protocol (WEP). We also examine the effectiveness of Media Access Control (MAC) and protocol filtering as a way of minimizing opportunity. Lastly, we look at the security advantages of using...