Meru adds radio-layer security to Wi-Fi

Meru has launched security software that can jam radio signals from rogue access points and scramble genuine signals to make it harder for hackers to overhear them.

"We offer radio jamming and scrambling, without changing anything on the client," said Joel Vincent, Meru's director of marketing. "It's layered on top of standard protection."

Despite years of development, the Wi-Fi security standards still leave possible gaps, said Vincent. Meru's architecture, he said, allows RF security that cannot be easily deployed on other systems.

Hackers can gain a lot of information by passive listening to the traffic on a Wi-Fi network, even one that is protected by encryption. Normal means of detecting and blocking rogue access points can miss "agile" rogues, which are synchronised with a normal WLAN's scanning cycle, and efforts to block them the network add extra throughput, said Vincent.

Wireless voice can also be a security problem, as handsets often don't support WPA: "Secure wireless VoIP needs extra hardware," he said.