Wi-Fi Alliance to Promote WLAN Security
The Wi-Fi alliance will use its pull in the industry to improve security measures in wireless LAN hardware over the next year.
The Austin, Texas, trade organization, which confers the right to use the Wi-Fi label on hardware, plans to increase encryption requirements for certification. But members of the security task groups within the alliance stress that the onus of WLAN security still lies with the customer.
Last fall, the group quietly made support for 64-character passwords a requirement for access points to be certified for WPA2—the next version of the Wi-Fi Protected Access protocol, which incorporates AES (Advanced Encryption Standard). The move came in reaction to a report last summer detailing potential attacks using rogue access points and a RADIUS server's shared secret. Adding characters to the shared secret makes the hack more difficult and less likely to succeed, experts said.
