What is the impact of the 802.11ac standard on security?

The upcoming 802.11ac standard, also known as "Gigabit Wi-Fi", has greatly improved the 802.11n, with the aim of significantly improving the data transmission speed, it also applies Wi-Fi to new fields, such as HD video transmission. The Enterprise 11ac draft product is expected to be available by 2013 and pass Wi-Fi Certification. Products based on the 11ac standard final version will appear at least in the next year.

The 11ac draft has a noteworthy impact on security, that is, it will only run on a 5 GHz channel. Some companies want to start scanning rogue AP and other unauthorized activities on the 5 GHz channel, but they still need to monitor the 2.4 GHz channel to ensure that intruders will not "hide" it. In addition, they also need to monitor the new 80 MHz and 160 MHz channels, which use a frequency similar to the old 20/40 MHz channel in 5 GHz, but in a different way.

Finally, the final version of the 802.11ac standard will introduce a new security Protocol-Galois/Counter Mode Protocol, GCMP), which has a greater impact on security. The final version of the standard is expected to be the current forced standard CCMP anti-pattern Protocol for verification Code with a password Block link, Counter Mode with Cipher Block Chaining Message Authentication Code Protocol) plus this Protocol. Both protocols can be used with Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), but the new GCMP is more efficient and supports ultra-high transmission speeds. According to RFC 5288, GCMP can efficiently achieve transmission speeds of over 10 Gbps in hardware.

Because the maximum transmission speed of 802.11ac is less than 7 Gbps, 11ac may not necessarily require GCMP, but it may appear on some new 11ac devices that support ultra-high throughput applications, such as household HD videos. Note that older Wi-Fi products do not support GCMP, and only the next generation of 802.11ac standard products will support GCMP. In the short term, this may increase security complexity, because some companies have to allow the AES-GCMP to retain backward-compatible functionality when migrating to AES-GCMP-situation with the industry migrating from Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) to WPA2 (CCMP) 10 years ago) very similar.