Wireless Local Area Network (wlan): Security Issues and Solutions

The purpose of this report is to investigate wireless LAN security issues and find currently available solutions to make WLAN as secure as wired network. WLAN technology has been accepted widely by business and domestic users, because it is easy to implement, cheap in the cost of ownership, and eliminate hard wiring. Associated with many conveniences it also came with security risks. There are many known issues and different types of attacks exist, which makes WLAN very vulnerable. The report explores most common attacks to aid understanding security risks within WLAN. Hence, different protocols and security measures are studied in detail to protect WLAN against different attacks. There are three different perspective which has been looked at, i.e. security hardware, WLAN policy and user awareness. They form the basic ingredients of WLAN security. To have the WLAN less vulnerable, it needs to have more advanced security protocol, strong network policy and fully security conscious users. Those are the key factors to make the WLAN as secure as the wired network.

2004; Yang et al. 2006; Selim, El Badawy & Salam 2006). The human factor is also equally or more important compare to protocol based security, appropriate training to network professionals and end user awareness will improve network security by far (Bhagyavati, Summers & DeJoie 2004). Securing or protecting WLAN against intruder attack is a complex and multi level process. With all the necessary security measures in place and security conscious users, WLAN can be as secure as wired network.

In this report, two main topics are covered: Well known WLAN attacks and currently available security measures. It is important to understand the threat first before putting the correct method in place to secure the network. This report shows in detail about each type of different attack based on the scope and impact. Following on from understanding security issues, next is to highlight how to make the network secure based on all mentioned attacks by looking into protocol, policies and hardware based techniques and what are the limitations and drawbacks. At the end conclusion will be drawn based on all the studies carried out in this report.

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