Tennessee's WLAN spans all 130 campus buildings and supports about 2,000 students, faculty and staff daily. More than 8,000 users are registered on the 802.11b network, which runs at up to 11 Mbps. "But we really get only 5 Mbps," Hanset says. "You use the wired network if you're looking for speed."
Wireless users generally don't connect at the full data-transfer rate because the connections are shared and performance dissipates as users move farther away from access points.
Today, users join the WLAN through a registration server that's integrated with an LDAP directory. Once they're registered, they can access the network anytime from anywhere on the WLAN. Registration won't be so convenient with the new 802.1x security architecture, however: Each time students open their laptops, they'll have to reauthenticate. "That's an annoyance," Hanset admits. The only way around that is to save settings, which defeats the purpose of authentication, he says.
Wireless security breaches at Tennessee have been similar to those on most campuses--a rogue wireless access point smuggled into a dorm, or an occasional war driver cruising campus. One popular method of hijacking Tennessee's airwaves is to tap into a WLAN "leak" from one of the university's buildings using a powerful antenna. "If you're in the line of sight, you can get broadband with this shortcut," Hanset says.
Hanset and his team detect these incidents by monitoring the bandwidth consumption of registered users. But what if the culprit isn't registered? You can't catch him, Hanset says, but you can time-out the session. "We can detect this by behavioral analysis" and by the user's MAC address, he says.
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