Wireless security

Location-based technology puts the walls back in wireless.

W`ireless LANs have always been touted for higher productivity, but wireless guru Matthew Gast, Chief Strategist in the office of the CTO at Trapeze Networks, knows that the technology has a pressing need for re-evaluation. As speed and efficiency are always a concern, so is security, and Gast said there is a need to “put the walls back” in order to keep information safe. Gast is also a voting member of the IEEE 802.11 working group, Chair of the 802.11 Task Group M, Chair of the Security Technical task group that is extending Wi-fi Protected Access (WPA), and has written a number of books. He presented at Wireless World 2009, which was held in Sydney in September. As part of his speech there, Gast identified new location-based technologies as the answer to restricting the places where wireless users can access the network. This new phase of wireless security will add to a network’s strength. A company can identify users accessing specific applications and restrict the places in which these applications can be used. For example, certain information might be available in the conference room, but not in the courtyard. “Just like we have buildings and walls to keep information safe, the difficulty with wireless LANs was that we relaxed that, and you could suddenly use networks to get at information anywhere. Now we’re in the process of putting the constraints back in,” Gast said. Because wireless networks introduced this new freedom and movement within a network, some information was deemed ‘too sensitive’ for the network, which grew out of various security concerns. “There was already a need to adapt to the idea that the walls were gone, and the way that manifested itself was that there was a fair bit of fear about wireless networks,” Gast said. The focus, according to Gast, is on making wireless networks as secure and reliable as wired networks, and he said that while the security technology is good, reliability and speed continue to be key points of concentration.  “We’re at the point now where wireless networks have arguably better security than the wired networks that they’re being deployed with, because you can identify the users and where they are and what they’re doing.” Gast said the demand for increased speed will never go away, and wireless network technology continues to increase its capacity, while making sure that faster speeds go hand-in-hand with making sure devices are power-efficient. But as speed and security become standard and accepted, reliability is the next step in order to make wireless complete and user-friendly. “Now that we have the speed of .11n, we’re moving on to address the concerns about reliability and manageability,” he said.