All about WiFi
WiFi. Everyone has heard of it, but not everyone knows exactly what it is. There is a lot of confusion between WiFi, Bluetooth, WiMax, Cellular and others. I won’t go into the details of each of these technologies in this article, but hopefully I can at least clear up what WiFi is and what it isn’t, as well as provide a few tips on how to ensure that your WiFi implementation is secure.
What WiFi is
WiFi is a shortname for Wireless Fidelity. What it does is allow various electronic devices to communicate with each other over short distances to eliminate the need for cables. The most common use for WiFi is to allow various computers access to an Internet Router to share the internet connection or other network resources such as printers and hard drives. With so many laptops today, people want to be mobile with them around the house and not have to drag an ethernet cord with them.
What WiFi isn’t
WiFi is not what you use to make calls on your mobile phone. That’s cellular. Phones can also have a WiFi radio to allow them to access your WiFi connection for data usage, but the calls are made over cellular.
WiFi is not what you use to connect your wireless mouse and keyboard to your computer. That’s bluetooth or wireless USB.
WiFi is not WiMax. That is another technology that is being rolled out in test markets around the country that has a much longer range connection. WiMax is what metropolitan areas would like to implement to allow high speed internet access to everyone.
What’s up with 802.11?
In technology, there are various groups of industry leaders that get together and decide the rules that should govern things. With WiFi, that group is called the IEEE. They determine, based on a number of things, how the technology should work so that everyone that provides it makes it just about the same way. This keeps everyone on the same page so that consumers are free to buy products from any manufacturer and know that it will (should) work with hardware from any other manufacturer.
WiFi has evolved over the years to accommodate speed, distance, and interference issues. The first major iteration was known as 802.11a. After that came 802.11b, and then 802.11g. 802.11n is the next major version that is currently available in a number of products, but not as prolific as 802.11g and even b.
As with anything, there are security holes in this technology. Nefarious types like to find these holes and and exploit them, thus gaining access to people’s networks. Over time, IEEE decided to get together and create another standard in terms of security. They called this one 802.11i. The strange thing is, a,b,g, and n all have to do with communication standards, whereas i determines the minimum set of security requirements for a WiFi network to be considered ’secure’. It’s all very convoluted, but their hearts are in the right place.
WEP, WPA, WPA2…?
Without going off on too much of a technical tangent, here is what you need to know:
WEP – Wireless Equivalent Privacy. NOT Wireless Encryption Protocol. This was the first attempt at security in WiFi. It failed and can be cracked in just a few seconds. Don’t use it.
WPA – WiFi Protected Access. This protocol was put in place while IEEE came up with a full set of security requirements for 802.11i. It was good for a while, but a crack was eventually found in it as well.
WPA2 – This is the one you want. It has a higher level of encryption that, as of this writing, has not been broken. The problem with it, is that older WiFi cards are not able to implement it. If that’s the case on a laptop that you have, you’ll either need to buy a USB external WiFi adapater, or just use one of the less secure options.
False sense of security
There are other settings available in WiFi that lead many users to a false sense of security.
The option to not broadcast your SSID (Service Set Identifier – your wireless network name) is probably the most useless one. There are hundreds of WiFi sniffers that will show you all the non-broadcasted networks in your area.
MAC address limitations. For most users, this is adequate, as I doubt most of us have anything on our computers worth the effort, but it is possible to ’spoof’ a MAC address. Essentially, the way this works is that your router will only allow certain pieces of equipment to connect to it, as designated by their MAC address. If a rogue person wants to connect to your network, they simply need to find a way to identify one of the MAC addresses that you’ve permitted on your network, and assign it to their computer, thus fooling your router into thinking it’s OK for them to be on your network.
Static IP addressing. This is similar to limiting connected devices by MAC address, only it’s a little bit easier to spoof. On the other hand, if you have 4 devices on your network, and limit your connections to 4, as long as those devices stay on all the time, someone can’t get onto your network.
So what do I do?
There are only a few things that consumers need to do when setting up their new wireless routers for the first time:
Change the default password of the router
Have it use WPA2
Create a strong password for your wireless connection
There are a number of more specific details regarding WiFi, but I’ll save that for another day. Hopefully this helped to clear up a few of the questions you may have about WiFi, and if you’ve got any more – leave a comment!
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