The IEEE 802.1X standard defines a method of authenticating and authorizing users to connect to an IEEE 802 LAN. It blocks users from accessing the network on the failure of authentication. IEEE 802.1X supports the Extensible Authentication Protocol-Transport Level Security (EAP-TLS) and Protected EAP-Microsoft Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol version 2 (PEAP-MS-CHAP v2) protocols. In the IEEE802.1X authentication system, an access point receives a connection request from a wireless client and forwards the request to the RADIUS server. The RADIUS server then uses the Active Directory database to determine whether the client should be granted access to the network.

The IEEE 802.1X standard defines a method of authenticating and authorizing users to connect to an IEEE 802 LAN. It blocks users from accessing the network on the failure of authentication. IEEE 802.1X supports the Extensible Authentication Protocol-Transport Level Security (EAP-TLS) and Protected EAP-Microsoft Challenge Handshake Authentication Protocol version 2 (PEAP-MS-CHAP v2) protocols. In the IEEE802.1X authentication system, an access point receives a connection request from a wireless client and forwards the request to the RADIUS server. The RADIUS server then uses the Active Directory database to determine whether the client should be granted access to the network.

Wireless networks today are the real needs of the business and technology world as it provides the interconnection between computers without any wires. The bottleneck of location and wires ,costs are all eliminated by the wireless technology. The wireless network setup concept is very much similar to that of a wired network where instead of the wires only wirelessly connections are made through wave spectrum.

It is a fairly simple setup. The Internet connection comes in from your provider and is connected to a wireless access point or router which broadcasts the signal. You connect wireless antenna network cards to your computers to receive that signal and talk back to the wireless access point and you are in business.

What are the Security issues ?

The risks to users of wireless technology have increased as the service has become more popular. There were relatively few dangers when wireless technology was first introduced. Crackers had not yet had time to latch on to the new technology and wireless was not commonly found in the work place. However, there are a great number of security risks associated with the current wireless protocols and encryption methods, and in the carelessness and ignorance that exists at the user and corporate IT level.Cracking methods have become much more sophisticated and innovative with wireles networks.

What are the different types of wireless security threats?

Denial of service attack

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. This works best on weakly encrypted systems such as WEP, where there are a number of tools available which can launch a dictionary style attack of “possibly accepted” security keys based on the “model” security key captured during the network recovery.

Network Injection attack

In a network injection attack, a cracker can make use of access points that are exposed to non-filtered network traffic, specifically broadcasting network traffic such as “Spanning Tree”, OSPF, RIP, and HSRP. The cracker injects bogus networking re-configuration commands that affect routers, switches, and intelligent hubs. A whole network can be brought down in this manner and require rebooting or even reprogramming of all intelligent networking devices.

What to do to detect the intrusion?

A number of times all the prevention schemes fail to provide you the wireless fulproof security. Wireless intrusion detection systems give you the way to deal in the lost conditions. Wireless IDSs can be purchased through a vendor or developed in-house. There are currently only a handful of vendors who offer a wireless IDS solution – but the products are effective and have an extensive feature set.

Popular wireless IDS solutions include Airdefense RogueWatch and Airdefense Guard , and Internet Security Systems Realsecure Server sensor and wireless scanner products . A homegrown wireless IDS can be developed with the use of the Linux operating system, for example, and some freely available software. Open source solutions include Snort-Wireless and WIDZ , among others.