Building a Private Wireless Infrastructure

The 802.11 standard has been broken, even with all the security measures built into it, usually because people put these systems into their companies without understanding how to use the integrated security measures to protect their wireless infrastructure against attack. In contrast, your wired infrastructure is more secure, because someone has to acquire physical access to the actual Ethernet wire in order to bypass the firewall in your organization and gain access to any system within your network.

When dealing with a wireless system, a potential hacker must get close enough to access the wireless carrier signal of your wireless access point. Most potential hackers must get within several hundred feet, but new wireless NIC cards have an external antenna designed to gain access to the network from even farther away.

Vulnerable Encryption

The Wi-Fi 802.11b infrastructure has difficulties with its encryption scheme, which can easily be decrypted. One of the ways that wireless users can make their wireless connection more secure is to connect through a virtual private network (VPN) that can be established through the wireless connection. Unfortunately, most users are either unaware of this capability or unwilling to implement it. The primary reason people are not impressed with using these forms of encryption is because they add a great deal of overhead to the connection. Encryption essentially slows down the speed of the wireless connection. In 802.11a environments this is not so bad because such environments have a maximum speed of 54 Mbps. However, since 802.11b is limited to a speed of 11 Mbps, adding encryption slows down the connection to the point of disrupting the user's wireless network connectivity.