Use Encryption in Your Home Wireless Network

To further protect your wireless communications, you should enable some form of encryption. Wireless manufacturers, in their haste to start selling equipment, rushed to create WEP (Wired Equivalent Privacy) encryption to provide some level of security while waiting for the official 802.1x security protocol to be standardized. It was quickly discovered that the underlying technology of WEP has a number of flaws which make it relatively easy to crack.

Wi-Fi Protected Access

The wireless industry has since migrated to the newer WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access) encryption, which offers a number of significant improvements over WEP yet remains backwards-compatible with WEP devices. In order to use WPA though, all devices on the network must be WPA-capable. If one device uses WEP, the network will not be able to use some of the improved security features of WPA and your network may still be vulnerable to being exploited by the weaknesses found in WEP.

WPA2

WPA2 has recently emerged to replace even WPA. Devices that are WPA2-compliant meet stricter security requirements.Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2) fully supports the features and functions of WPA2, allowing a higher level of wireless network security as long as all of your wireless network clients are capable of the same security level.

While a knowledgeable and dedicated attacker with the right tools can still crack the encryption and access your wireless data, this should not discourage you from enabling it. It would be unusual for someone to dedicate that much time and effort to get into your wireless network when they can probably find five more unprotected wireless networks on the next block. It isn’t practical to think you will be 100-percent secure, but turning on some form of encryption combined with the other precautions listed previously will deter the casual hacker and curious passerby.

The more complex encryption schemes require more processing power to encode and decode, so you may consider sticking with the 40-bit (64-bit on some devices) WEP encryption rather than the stronger 128-bit, or even the WPA encryption, if you notice any performance issues. It is the difference between locking your house with a normal lock or using a deadbolt. Since an attacker can get past both with about the same effort, you may as well use the one that is easier for you but that still prevents most users from accessing your wireless network.

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