Wirless Lan Security Essay

The architecture of the wireless technology, security mechanism employed in the architecture as well as challenges and counters attacks. Introduction Wireless technology has become common and it is now rapidly extending due to its demand that is highly triggered by availability of portable devices such as the smart phone, tablets and laptops which have good communication capabilities which also include connecting to the internet. According to statistics, the number of active mobile subscribers is 7. 9 billion across the world and approximately 58% of the people are using internet in the world (Kemp , 2017). This is considered as a great advantage to the business people and entrepreneurs as it gives them flexibility of conducting electronic commerce with almost anyone, at any time and from anywhere through the available mobile communication channels.

However, the effort to secure wireless network, is undermined by its broadcasting nature of radio propagation, making it hard to achieve all of the network security requirements in the wireless. Besides that, efforts have been made to make sure that security is and should be well implemented in the existing wireless networks, which comprises of the Interoperability for Long Term Evolution (LTE), Bluetooth, Mobile Communication, Near Field Communication (NFS), Long Microwave Access (WiMAX), and Wireless Fidelity (Wi-Fi). In general, a wireless network makes use of the open systems interconnection protocol, OSI architecture that comprises of several layers which includes; a. Layer of application b. Layer of transport c. The designing of a secure wireless network is based on include the authorization, authentication and information encryption methodologies during the communication process.

However, the design must balance the information latency and implementation complexity in order to adhere to the simplicity principle of wireless network. Security requirements in wireless network In a secured wireless networks, communication and information exchange is among or between authorized individuals. However the procedure is extremely in danger to multiple threat that are malicious and attacks due to the nature of the broadcast of the network for wireless technology. Therefore, requirements for security for networks for wireless are known so that to protect wireless communication and sharing of confidential data against attacks by malicious on wireless such as, data falsification and eavesdropping. In case information integrity is violated by insider attacks, such node is referred compromised node and it cannot be regarded as legitimate node and its information cannot be relied on what’s so ever since damage may have been inflicted upon information integrity by malicious attacks, which may include data modification and message injection among other forms of attacks.

Since a compromise node may be containing valid information although running malicious codes, there is a solution for recovery. The most suitable solution is to sense nodes that are compromised by the use of code that is automatic updating and recovery processes which makes sure that the devices are patched periodically and in case of a device that is compromised, it is sensed. Compromised devices are usually noticed through a failed patch. Compromised devices are revoked and repair through recovery of code and process of update (Park & Kasera, 2012). Therefore, there must be access point (AP) of a wireless. AP is a node hardware which devices are allowed such as the cell phones with a capability of connecting via wireless technology, to connect to a wireless network, transmit information as well as communicating to each other wirelessly by providing a link for data communication among wireless network devices.

A good example of wireless technologies that makes use of access point (AP) is Wi-Fi. The background of the Wi-Fi networks is accordance with standards of IEEE 802. 11 b/g p at a greater extend. Authentication of WEP employs a challenge of four-step response and a greeting between a Wi-Fi access point (AP) and the end client (user) functioning in the help of shared WEP key. WEP operation and authentication requires client to send an authentication request first to the AP, then AP is expected to replies with a challenge in plain text. Then the client encrypts the it challenge text received from the AP by use of WEP key that was shared earlier and the text that is encrypted is sent back to the AP.

The received text by AP is then decrypted by use of the WEP pre-shared key then makes tries in comparing the decrypted text to the initial original plain text send to the client as a challenge. It the AP finds a match in the two texts, AP sends a successful notice to the client indicating that access is granted. The algorithm of the WEP key is successfully used to attack a wireless network to discover the WEP key used by the network. This makes WEP unable to protect the information against replay attacks and forgery giving attackers a room for intentionally replaying or even modifying information at hand without genuine users noticing that information falsification and replay has been done by the un-authorized users (Tews & Pyshkin, 2014).

WEP makes it easy for malicious attacker to forge or guess the shared WEP key for authentication message which is straightforward to the unauthorized individual to pretend being the genuine user therefor gaining the ability to steal important and confidential information. The Wi-Fi access protection (WPA) The security protocol for WPA was proposed to address the shortcomings of the WEP Wi-Fi security protocol without being required to change the hardware. WPA standard is categorized in to two main types that is the; Personal WPA which is aimed to be utilized at home short of the need of a server authentication since the key for secret usually is shared before among clients and AP. TKIP encryption process Illustration 1 Wi-Fi Access protection 2 (WPA2) is accordance with the standards on IEEE 802.

11i, protocol whereby only the authorized individuals are allowed to access the wireless nodes, with operations that supports stronger cryptography approaches such as the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) for stronger authentication and access control. WEP attacks and weaknesses Although WPA is an improvement of the WEP, it is also vulnerable to varied practical attacks. One of the attacks is the PSK cracking which involves recovering of the WPA/WPA2 PSK from a gained key handshake frames by used of a tools called KisMAC and wpa_crack in conjunction with the dictionary attack. Service set identifier flaw. , & Saha, D. Securing electronic commerce: Reducing the SSL overhead. Reducing the SSL overhead IEEE Network, 8-16. Danesh, S. , Mansoor, M. , Mansoor, M. , & Danesh, A. Wired equivalent privacy (WEP) versus Wi-Fi protected access (WPA).