by Vince Vittore

Considering the current state of foreign affairs, security issues may be of particular interest to attendees at the CTIA's Wireless 2003 event. And given the amount of press attention focused on hacker attempts to access networks via wireless technology, vendors and carriers are hoping the event will be a chance to show off how far they've come.

While security issues — particularly those related to Wi-Fi — are gaining their fair share of mind time, those directly involved with the technology say it's more a matter of changing public perception and debunking myths. Wi-Fi security within a wireless LAN can be an issue, but in a wireless ISP environment it's more legend than reality, according to numerous vendors and carriers.

“We couldn't tell you of a specific incident where someone has been able to hack into a wireless [ISP] network,” said Jeff Orr, product marketing manager for Proxim, one of the larger Wi-Fi vendors.

Much of the concern over security can be traced back to last May, when either an anonymous user or a security analyst — depending on whose version you believe — claimed to have grabbed a credit card number from a wireless cash register at a Best Buy location by monitoring the correct frequencies in the store's parking lot.

However, if such incidents are true, they are becoming increasingly rare as a result of recently developed standards. Beginning with Wired Equivalent Privacy, vendors have been implementing encryption technologies that make it more difficult for anyone who happens upon the correct frequency to see into the data stream. The most recent standard — Wi-Fi Protected Access (WISP), which is being pushed by the Wi-Fi Alliance and is based on IEEE standards — has found plenty of support from WLAN vendors. And even in the WISP space, carriers and vendors are as likely to use standard encryption combined with authentication and authorization procedures

“A lot of times people don't understand what a hot spot really is,” said Ken Upcraft, vice president of marketing and sales for Usurf, a carrier that uses Wi-Fi to provide high-speed data service in the Denver area. “You can't just walk into a Starbucks and just start using it. You still have to sign up for the service, and unless someone knows your password, they can't get in just by figuring out the frequency.”

One of Usurf's most significant deployments has been with the Douglas County, Colo., Justice Center, which is sending court records to be backed up over a Wi-Fi link to another location. “We used 128k encryption, and that was enough to convince them that no one was going to be able to steal their signal,” Upcraft said.

Still, the public's fixation with the ability to just grab a piece of data from thin air dictates that vendors and carriers pay an inordinate amount of attention to security.


Article source and further details: TeleponyOnline