Is Always-On Always Secure?

One of the critical issues involved with the growing wireless market is security. Consumers and home businesses have been purchasing wireless devices to transmit everything from music to photos. However, mid-sized to large businesses, especially financial ones (banks, brokers, etc.) don't trust this technology, and with a good reason. It's not secure.

Layers of Security

A recent article in PC World advises to "layer" your wireless defenses in this manner:

1. To defend themselves against "war driving," users can simply turn on the WEP encryption that is already built in, and most war drivers will just move on to one of the many wireless LANs that isn't protected.

2. Going to the next step, users can implement user authentication and dynamic WPA, with keys that change, to protect themselves from "script kiddies," teenagers who use packaged hacking tools to infiltrate systems. Those authentication systems should include one of the current versions of the Extensible Authentication Protocol. (More about these later.)

3. For protection against professional hackers, the article recommends going the next step to strong encryption systems such as TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol), which will be used in WPA and 802.11i, or CKIP (Cisco Key Integrity Protocol ), a proprietary implementation of the 802.11i recommendations that Cisco developed as a stop-gap measure.

Maximum wireless security, then, is a combination of several techniques: strong authentication and a strong encryption mechanism, coupled with data integrity.

(I'll be posting more about this. In the meantime, I'd like to hear about anyone's experiences with wireless security.)