Answers to three wireless network knowledge questions

The wireless lan q & A is a simple summary in the previous article. After that, some friends still have some questions about wireless network knowledge. Next, I have selected several questions to explain. I hope you can understand the relevant content clearly ｡

Wireless Network Knowledge Question 1:

Can a wireless network support Voice IP (Voice over Internet Protocol, VoIP?

The related standards are 802.11e, which is expected to be officially approved soon. It is designed to replace them prior to widespread establishment of private protocols such as Spectralink Voice Priority (SVP ｡

Like 802.1p for wired Ethernet, 802.1e adds a Quality of Service (Qos) mechanism, this provides support for speech, video, and other latency-sensitive applications. It defines eight data transmission types or priorities, the length of the waiting time from the time when the network workstation encounters a conflict in transmission to the time when it tries to transmit data again ｡

The combination of VoIP and the 802.11 standard in a foreseeable form will make it possible to simultaneously transmit voice and data in a single wireless network architecture, thus, the voice transmission function can be realized on the PDA and notebook computer ｡

Wireless Network Knowledge Question 2:

WEP wireless security standards have been considered unable to ensure network security. What are the weaknesses of this technology alternative?

Wireless Equivalent Privacy (WEP) provides a method to prevent irregular network monitoring using message detectors. However, it is not safe to use this technology for a series of reasons, among them, the most interesting thing is that it uses a shared static key with a fixed length. This means that as long as a sufficient number of packets can be obtained and brute-force cracking is performed on the key, it is relatively easy to break it ｡

There are several other technologies to choose from, such as key hopping. This technology can change the WEP key every few seconds. This makes it very difficult for attackers to attack, because it takes about a few minutes to analyze the data that contains the same key ｡

IEEE has released a security standard named 802.11i, which can be used to authenticate port-based users and devices in existing 802.1x specifications, wi-Fi protects access (WPA) and Robust Security Network (Robust Security Network, RSN )｡

WPA is a subset of 802.11i. It fixes WEP vulnerabilities by changing keys and hybrid keys, it also uses 802.1x and Its Extended Authentication Protocol (EAP) based on a central authentication server such as Radius ｡

At least theoretically, using all of these technologies can avoid using VPNs. In addition, some existing WLAN hardware will be upgraded to WPA. However, some early-generation devices may not be compatible with WPA, so it is still unknown whether necessary encryption and decryption software is used on client devices that cannot provide sufficient power such as PDAs ｡

Wireless Network Knowledge Question 3:

So does this mean that enterprises should wait for their 802.11i devices to go public?

Not necessarily. WPA has fixed some weaknesses of WEP, which makes the latter no longer applicable to enterprise users, but more importantly, WPA should be able to work on numerous legacy devices ｡

However, the future of wireless network security will be 802.11i and RSN. The latter provides security through dynamic negotiation authentication and encryption mechanism between AP and mobile devices. This technology is also based on 802.1x and EAP, the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption algorithm is also adopted, which supports up to 256 bits of password length ｡

Dynamic negotiation will gradually make RSN a new algorithm and significantly enhance its security compared with WEP and WPA, it can provide the same security protection as IPSec. The obstacle to using this technology is that customers may not be willing to add new devices to clients and AP devices in early production, with a higher speed algorithm and better performance ｡