ABSTRACT
For the past few years, the explosion in deployment of wireless local area networks (WLANs) was delayed
only due to concerns about their security exposures. Since introduction to the market in mid-1999,
802.11 WLAN technologies have gone through several revisions as 802.11b, 802.11a, and 802.11g, while
the main headache to all of them was numerous vulnerabilities discovered in the 802.11 initial security
mechanism known as Wire Equivalent Privacy (WEP). The Wi-Fi Alliance industry consortium since
then has made several efforts to address the security issues as well as interoperability of the security
solution; and as result of that effort, in mid-2003, the Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) specification was
born to address major security issues within the WEP protocol. Despite all the headaches with the
security exposures WLAN technologies have due to flexibility and easiness in their deployment, they have
already penetrated the IT world in most enterprises as well as public areas, hotels, cafes, and airports.
Hence, information security professionals must be aware of the issues with the old and current WLAN
technology as well as technical solutions that already exist or are in the development pipeline to come to
market soon. The aim of this chapter is to offer an overview of the 802.11 WLAN historical security facts
and focus on a technical solution that lies ahead.
