What is wifi security?
To opt best wifi security system understand about Security in computer world determines the ability of the system to manage, protect and distribute sensitive information. Data Security was found many years before the advent of wireless communication due to the mankind’s need to send information without exposing its content to others. The first and most known machine (Enigma) was used in WWII by the German military to encrypt their messages. The machine was something similar to a simple typing machine with a scrambler unit to obfuscate the content of the messages.
As Wi-Fi enabled laptops and PDAs become commonplace, the technology has become a standard part of corporate IT infrastructures. Still, security remains an issue and is arguably the main inhibitor of ubiquitous wireless deployment.
What is data encryption ?
In computing, encryption is the method by which plain text or any other type of data is converted from a readable form to an encoded version, that can only be decoded by another entity if they have access to a decryption key. Encryption is one of the most important methods for providing data security, especially for end-to-end protection of data transmitted across networks.This is very important to choose Best wifi security system.
To send data securely between two nodes, the system must encrypt the data or “systematically scramble information so that it cannot be read without knowing the coding key”. This operation determines to a certain level the strength of the security system, the harder it is to break the encrypted message the more secure the system is to be. Common use of encryption/decryption techniques, where unsecured messages (plain text) are encrypted using a special encryption technique, sent over the network, then encrypted at the destination to viewed back as un encrypted messages.
Best wifi security system to prevent unauthorized access
The modes of unauthorized access to links, to functions and to data is as variable as the respective entities make use of program code. There does not exist a full scope model of such threat. To some extent the prevention relies on known modes and methods of attack and relevant methods for suppression of the applied methods.
Identity theft (MAC spoofing)
Identity theft (or MAC spoofing) occurs when a hacker is able to listen in on network traffic and identify the MAC address of a computer with network privileges. Most wireless systems allow some kind of MAC filtering to allow only authorized computers with specific MAC IDs to gain access and utilize the network. However, programs exist that have network “sniffing” capabilities.
Combine these programs with other software that allow a computer to pretend it has any MAC address that the hacker desires, and the hacker can easily get around that hurdle. MAC filtering is effective only for small residential networks, since it provides protection only when the wireless device is “off the air”.
Any 802.11 device “on the air” freely transmits its unencrypted MAC address in its 802.11 headers, and it requires no special equipment or software to detect it. Anyone with an 802.11 receiver (laptop and wireless adapter) and a freeware wireless packet analyzer can obtain the MAC address of any transmitting 802.11 within range.
Man in the middle attacks
A man-in-the-middle attacker entices computers to log into a computer which is set up as a soft AP (Access Point). Once this is done, the hacker connects to a real access point through another wireless card offering a steady flow of traffic through the transparent hacking computer to the real network. The hacker can then sniff the traffic. One type of man-in-the-middle attack relies on security faults in challenge and handshake protocols to execute a “de-authentication attack”. This attack forces AP-connected computers to drop their connections and reconnect with the hacker’s soft AP.
Denial of service - Best wifi security system
A Denial-of-Service attack (DoS) occurs when an attacker continually bombards a targeted AP (Access Point) or network with bogus requests, premature successful connection messages, failure messages, and/or other commands. These cause legitimate users to not be able to get on the network and may even cause the network to crash. These attacks rely on the abuse of protocols such as the Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP)
The usual reason for performing a DoS attack is to observe the recovery of the wireless network, during which all of the initial handshake codes are re-transmitted by all devices, providing an opportunity for the malicious attacker to record these codes and use various cracking tools to analyze security weaknesses and exploit them to gain unauthorized access to the system.
Security measures to choose Best wifi security system.
- SSID hiding
A simple but ineffective method to attempt to secure a wireless network is to hide the SSID (Service Set Identifier). This provides very little protection against anything but the most casual intrusion efforts.
- MAC ID filtering
One of the simplest techniques is to only allow access from known, pre-approved MAC addresses. Most wireless access points contain some type of MAC ID filtering. However, an attacker can simply sniff the MAC address of an authorized client and spoof this address.
- Regular WEP
The Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) encryption standard was the original encryption standard for wireless, but since 2004 with the ratification WPA2 the IEEE has declared it “deprecated”, and while often supported, it is seldom or never the default on modern equipment. Concerns were raised about its security as early as 2001, dramatically demonstrated in 2005 by the FBI, yet in 2007 T.J. Maxx admitted a massive security breach due in part to a reliance on WEP and the Payment Card Industry took until 2008 to prohibit its use – and even then allowed existing use to continue until June 2010.