The Future
Today, much of the wireless industry is focused on 802.11i as the solution to its security quandary. The IEEE has done a good job of addressing the vulnerabilities while adding new services. Given the negative press that surrounded the IEEE's Swiss-cheese-like WEP standard, it's understandable that the 802.11i committee needed to be thorough, though when it came time to address the issue of fast handoff to support low-latency secure roaming across IP subnets, the committee punted.
It's likely that 802.11i's most significant impact will be symbolic, however, allaying the fears of zealous security professionals and opening the way for broader deployment of WLANs. Widespread adoption is unlikely anytime soon. It will take some time to stabilize and to verify interoperability among vendor offerings. In addition, 802.11i will still require IT professionals to make basic decisions about which RADIUS server to implement and which EAP authentication types to support.
Given the likely momentum associated with 802.11i, it will be interesting to see whether the market can sustain the wide range of targeted products. This sector is ripe for consolidation, but picking the winners is no easy task. The good news is that two years from now, security will no longer be an obstacle to enterprise WLAN adoption.
DAVE MOLTA is a senior technology editor at NETWORK COMPUTING. He is also assistant dean for technology at the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and director of the Center for Emerging Network Technologies. Write to him at [email protected].
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