If you don’t want your network to fall victim to snooping or people ‘borrowing’ your bandwidth, then you’re going to need to lock down your network. Luckily for you, all wireless technology has encryption built in — it’s just a matter of turning it on.
WEP Vs. WPA.
Security on wireless networks does have a flaw, though — there are two completely incompatible standards, which makes it a pain to set up a whole network to use encryption.
How did this happen? Well, WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) was the original standard for encryption over 802.11 wireless networks. Back in 2001, though, a research paper was published called ‘Weaknesses in the Key Scheduling Algorithm of RC4′. This paper demonstrated critical flaws in the security of WEP that made it trivial for someone to break into, if they wanted to.
Essentially, it is too easy to discover the secret ‘key’ used for WEP, and once you have the key, you can get into the network and stay in for as long as you want. People quickly recognised that it was almost useless to use WEP on their network — but by the time its weaknesses were discovered, the WEP method was built into almost every piece of wireless equipment out there…
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