*Assistant Professor, Dept. of Engineering, Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology
**Dept. of Information Technology, Maharaja Surajmal Institute of Technology
Online published on 21 August, 2014.
This paper begins by introducing the concept of WLAN. The introductory section gives brief information on the WLAN components and its architecture. Wireless local area network (WLAN) has been widely used in many sectors. The popularity gained is due to many reasons, such as ease of installation, installation flexibility, mobility, reduced cost-of-ownership, and scalability. However, regardless of the benefits mentioned above, WLAN have some security threats, in which anyone who use it or intend to use it should be aware of. In order to examine the WLAN security threats, this paper will look at Denial of Service, Spoofing, and Eavesdropping. The paper will then explain how Wired Equivalent Privacy (WEP) works, which is the IEEE 802.11b/WiFi standard encryption for wireless networking. The discussion of WEP continues by examining its weaknesses, which result in it being much less secured than what was originally intended. This situation leads to further research regarding practical solutions in implementing a more secured WLAN (WPA2).
