Question

Create a policy for 802.11 Wi-Fi security in a wireless network in a 500-employee company with a 47-access point WLAN. This is not a trivial task. Do not just jot down a few notes. Make it a document for people in your firm to read.

Answer 1

The 802.11 wireless networks (Wi-Fi) is one of the best networks. As of it is easy and fast deployment and installation.

There are two modes in which Wireless Network operates:

a) Infrastructure mode:
In this operation mode, each wireless client connects directly to a central device called Access Point.

b) Ad-hoc mode:
In this operation mode, each wireless client connects directly with each other. There is no central device managing the connections, meaning that each wireless client talks to each other freely.

Currently the IEEE 802.11i is the most used security standard released, that is used to protect wireless networks. In case of not using 802.11i standard in wireless network, other security measures like VPN, IPSec, etc can be used.

Some of the suggestions for security measures:

• The access control list : Access control secures the network by filtering out unknown users and requires a list of authorized client’s MAC addresses to be loaded in the Access Point. Only those registered MAC addresses will be able to communicate with the Access Point, and will drop any communication that come from others not registered MAC addresses.
• WEP (Wireless Equivalent Policy) uses encryption to protect the data.
• WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access): Using a unique password for connection to network.

I would suggest using Access control: Registering all the devices which should be connected to network, would ease the given task.