WLAN Security : WLAN Security

Abstract: WLANs are become popular due to their different advantages. Beside all these advantages WLANs are also facing the major problem of the security, so that why lots of people are doing research on WLAN to improve the security because many companies want to transfer their sensible data over WLAN. This report discusses the security issues of WLAN based on IEEE 802.11 standard, such type of networks are referred to as wifi network. WLAN is deployed as an extension of already existed wired LAN. Therefore it is necessary to provide the security of WLAN equals to Wired LAN. We worked in a lab environment in order to configure the three different security solutions (WEP, WPA & WPA2 using IEEE 802.1X and RADIUS Server) on infrastructure mode for personnel and enterprise architecture of WLAN. For each security solution we used the backtrack as a security cracking tool, in order to break the WEP (64 and 128 bit long) security key of WLAN, make comparison between 64 and 128 bit long WEP key and also analyzed the different kind of attacks  and some drawbacks of using WEP security in WLAN. In the same way configure the WPA and WPA2 (using IEEE 802.1X and RADIUS Server) security solution in infrastructure mode of WLAN and use the same security cracking tool backtrack in order to break the security of the WLAN and analyze the different attacks on the network in these architecture and drawbacks of using WPA and WPA2 Security solutions. By using IEEE 802.1X and RADIUS Server we can improve the security of the enterprise network. In the end we come with many conclusions and suggestions that will help in order to provide better security while deploying Wireless LAN.