Hackproofing Your Wireless Network

With the arrival of IEEE 802.11b (a.k.a. WiFi) and other wireless networking technologies on the market comes a wave of stories about snoops intercepting sensitive LAN traffic from out in the company parking lot or across the concourse at the airport. Hack Proofing Your Wireless Network takes a look at strategies for defending wireless LANs--those based on Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11a as well as WiFi--against signal interception and other attacks peculiar to their wireless nature. Unfortunately, there's also a lot of background information on WiFi (as well as on security principles in general), and this is related to wireless network security only tangentially. Though this material represents unneeded padding, the bulk of the book is made up of useful information about security strategies and defensive configuration. There's also a fair bit of information about the security characteristics of some top-selling wireless networking products.

In a section on choosing WiFi access points, the authors give a very explicit list of requirements (the ability to disable service-set identifier broadcasts, 128-bit Wired Equivalent Protocol--WEP--and so on), and list at least three real products (by make and model) that fit the specifications. They then proceed to show how to choose the most secure configuration options on each of the featured products, including the Cisco Systems Aironet and the Agere ORiNOCO. Configuration instructions are easy to follow and illustrated in detail. Information on the offensive side of the equation is shallower--the authors point out that it's possible to drive around, looking for unsecured wireless access points and that WEP has security flaws. Still, this book is one of the first on security for wireless networks, and it provides a lot of good information to the administrators of such networks. --David Wall

Topics covered: The special security characteristics of wireless networks (primarily including, but not limited to, those operating under the IEEE 802.11 standards) and some recommended procedures for the administrators of such networks. Wired Equivalent Protocol (WEP), MAC filtering, and virtual private networks (VPNs) tailored for use in wireless environments get particularly admirable coverage.