How to select Wireless Encryption in wireless networks

You don't design a network with internet access and no firewall. So why do you have a wireless network without encryption? Understanding wireless encryption is important for deploying a secure wireless network.

The safety of wireless transmissions is analogous to a letter. There are various ways to send letters, and each method improves the security level and protects the integrity of the information. You can send a postcard, but all the people can see the information on the postcard. You can put the letter in the envelope and seal it, which protects the letter from being seen by chance. If you do make sure that the letter is only visible to the recipient, you will need to encrypt or encode the letter and confirm that the recipient knows how you coded it.

The same is true for wireless data transfer. No encrypted wireless data is transmitted in the air, and any wireless device nearby can intercept the data.

Using the WEP (Wired Equivalent Protocol) protocol provides minimal security for your wireless network encryption because it is easy to hack. If you really want to protect your wireless data, you should use a more secure encryption method, such as WPA. To help you understand these options, here are some of the existing wireless encryption methods and security technologies:

· WEP (Wired Equivalent protocol). WEP is an encryption method that is used by some manufacturers eager to produce wireless devices to hastily piece together fake encryption standards before protocol standards are finalized. As a result, this standard later found that there were many vulnerabilities, and even an inexperienced attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities.

· WPA (Wi-Fi Protected access). WPA is used to improve or replace a vulnerable WEP protocol. WPA provides more powerful encryption than WEP, addressing many of the weaknesses of WEP.

1.TKIP (Temporary Key Integrity protocol). TKIP is a basic technology that allows WPA to be backward compatible with WEP and existing wireless hardware. Tkip with WEP makes this encryption method more secure than WEP by using a longer key, a 128-bit key, and a key that changes once per click of each packet.

2.EAP (Extensible Authentication Protocol). With the support of the EAP Protocol, WPA encryption provides more functionality to control wireless network access based on the PKI (Public key Infrastructure), rather than filtering on a MAC address only. The filtering method is easy to be deceived by others.

Although WPA improves WEP security and is more secure than the WEP protocol, any encryption is stronger than nothing. If WEP is the only protection that your current wireless device has, this encryption will still prevent you from randomly breaking through your wireless data, allowing most inexperienced attackers to look for unprotected wireless networks.