RF fingerprinting systems take building attributes into account. Measurements are conducted across the WLAN to train the intelligent systems to compensate for attenuation sources, such as walls and cabinets. The systems can determine the RF signatures of signals at specific points in your WLAN, compensating for signal degradation and enhancing location granularity. Although they require hours of RF signature training, the systems can track a location to within 100 square feet. --Jesse LindemanWhen it comes to wireless security, the latest buzzword is WPA (Wi-Fi Protected Access). This quasi-standard has arrived to save us from WEP's inadequacies and design blunders. Most people view WPA as an interim solution to be supplanted by 802.11i once the IEEE finishes that standard.
Essentially a subset of 802.11i, WPA provides a workable security architecture compatible with legacy hardware devices. While the 802.11i Task Group has defined the RSN (Robust Security Network) model to address WEP vulnerabilities, WPA is a tactical move by Wi-Fi manufacturers, under the banner of the Wi-Fi Alliance, to address WLAN security.
Both RSN and WPA share an architecture that covers upper-level authentication, key distribution, key renewal and other procedures. However, WPA is built around TKIP (Temporal Key Integrity Protocol), while the more thorough and elaborate RSN supports AES in addition to TKIP. In other words RSN uses stronger encryption and can support future upper-layer authentication. WPA can be implemented with a software/ firmware upgrade in most WLAN products, but hardware replacement is a must for RSN because of the CPU-intensive security mechanisms embedded in the 802.11i standard. Fortunately, most WLAN chipsets have integrated AES hardware support.
TKIP was not invented exclusively by WPA's designers. Rather, when the security deficiencies of WEP were published two years ago, many Wi-Fi vendors tried to solve the problem by rolling out proprietary enhancements to WEP; this work came to be known as TKIP. Unfortunately, interoperability remained a problem.
TKIP addresses WEP's weak key management and uses the RC4 cipher stream algorithm for data encryption. RC4 continues to be used because the installed base lacks the CPU horsepower to run AES, and the algorithm can handle packets in a lossy media.
Vendors also began experimenting with dynamic key management, which reduces vulnerability to attack and provides a workable enterprise-class key implementation framework. Cisco was first to deliver such a system, but like early TKIP implementations, its work is proprietary.
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