What concerns should be understood about data communications being sent over wireless networks? Discuss the pros and cons of one method of transmission, such as Wireless Application Protocol (Search t

Since the dotcom bubble burst on 10th March 2000, Almost two decades have passed since and has brought new realism to the internet economy (Madslien, 2010). Over the last 18 years, 802.11 Wireless LAN's( Local Area Networks) have matured leading to a different throughput of wireless networks, from 54Mbps of 802.11G(5GHz) up to 600 MBps from 802.11n(2.4/5 GHz). Along with an economy of ever-increasing mobile devices, there has been a need to improving the enlarging the area of Wireless Local Area Networks, be it in an airport or a shopping complex, or educational/professional locations, government building to hospitals. Use of WLAN's has become a necessity for connectivity within a given location. With the increase in flexibility and logistical use of wireless equipment, organizations have started to implement them as they have low-cost hardware and cheaper to maintain and install.

There may be any benefits of using WLAN in corporate use as scaling up the network zone is easy and reduces the hassle of the point to point wiring to each terminal. Also coupled with long life and cheaper replacement cost have saved cost and resources for organizations.

But, there have been increased threats, as with wired transmissions there was a confirmation of data privacy but due to WLAN, any entity with the capability to listen to the radio frequency can tap into the communication stream, to mitigate this WEP security standard was implemented, which later was improved by using WPA, WPA2.

Attacks on WLAN technology has been defined within two broad terms, Passive and Active. In Passive attack the intruder only listens to the information being transmitted to and from the network but in Active attacks the intruder modifies the information to provide false and corrupt data (Waliullah & Gan, 2014).

Few of the attacks being:

• Confidentiality Attacks

  • Traffic analysis

  • Eavesdropping

  • Man In the Middle

• Access Control Attack

  • Unauthorized access

  • War Driving

  • MAC address spoofing

• Integrity

• Authentication

• Availability

References:

Madslien, J. (2010, March 09). Dotcom bubble burst: 10 years on. Retrieved July 25, 2018, from http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/8558257.stm

Waliullah, M., & Gan, D. (2014). Wireless LAN Security Threats & Vulnerabilities. International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications,5(1). doi:10.14569/ijacsa.2014.050125