Security remains the key issue deterring enterprise users from making major investments in Wi-Fi, despite all the improvements over the past year. Whether real or perceived, the security risks of wireless LANs are still holding deployments back. Conscious of this, the Wi-Fi Alliance is trying to beef up standard security still further. It has already agreed to a dual-layer security approach, with WPA2 (the brand name for the 802.11i standard) supporting advanced functions including AES encryption, while the more basic WPA – originally an interim standard en route to 802.11i – will be kept for devices that require less stringent security and lower costs, particularly in the consumer space.
Now the group intends, for WPA2, to enforce a higher level of encryption, reiterating a decision it tentatively made last autumn to require 64-character passwords. This move was in response to a spate of rogue access point attacks and new question marks over Wi-Fi’s resistance to hackers.
It is even possible that the ‘lite’ version of WPA will be dropped later this year, making it compulsory even for consumer devices to support WPA2 in order to be certified as Wi-Fi compatible.
The risk of a very stringent requirement is that vendors at the budget end of the market bypass testing and certification altogether and so undermine the Wi-Fi Alliance’s brand. Many consumers have been found to recognize generic terms such as wireless LAN, and individual brands such as Centrino, more than the term Wi-Fi, so it can be argued that Wi-Fi certification is not essential to success in the home market.
Read this full article at theregister.co.uk
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